Tag: boulder
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Stone Ruck
A rather dull morning but I somehow managed to miss the downpour. The high moors have somewhat woolly boundaries. Sometimes they follow the meandering of streams and other natural features, elsewhere they may be a straight line between landmarks drawn in an office or mapped as “Undefined”. The parish boundary between Whorlton and Bilsdale West…
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Scugdale – home of the Yorkshire Giant
Today is the birthday of one-time newspaper editor, politician, purveyor of celebrated hoaxes, promotor of a blend of fake and real, who is widely credited with coining the adage “There’s a sucker born every minute”. His dubious business practices crossed the border into the unscrupulous, and his name lives on in film and legend. He…
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The Boulder
“I like that boulder. That is a nice boulder.” So said Donkey to Shrek. The climbing fraternity have dubbed this huge boulder below Ward Nab on Coate Moor as simply “The Boulder”. I feel sure it must at some time have had another name but it looks like that has been lost to history. A…
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Dear Rishi Sunak,
I am writing this open letter, as one of your constituents, to express my concern at some of the aspects of the introduction of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill 2021 which I believe has been deliberatively drafted as an excessively lengthy document (307 pages) and which is being rushed through the Commons on…
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Dorothy’s Stone
I met an oldish chap on the climb up Turkey Nab once and he told me this was Dorothy’s Stone. I wished I’d have pressed him why now. A mixture of thoughts. After the gloom of the overnight mist, the blue is refreshing and joyous. It’s enazuring or turning azure. An old word that is particularly…
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Ben Arthur/The Cobbler
At 884m high, Ben Arthur, familiarly known as The Cobbler, is only a Corbett but is a cracking hill. It is one of a group of hills known as the Arrochar Alps: The Cobbler, and the Munros Beinn Narnaim and Beinn Ime. I believe technically The Cobbler refers to the central peak and Ben Arthur…
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‘A Wild Year’
Did you watch ‘A Wild Year‘ on BBC2 on Friday evening, featuring the North York Moors? It’ll be available on iPlayer for a while. I was left feeling disappointed. The filming was superb of course, slow motion and time lapsed, the usual BBC quality, but when it came to the inevitable section on grouse management,…
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It’s looking a bit black over Bill’s mother’s
An East Midlands expression that came back to me on Potter’s Ridge, a small hill that has Highcliffe Nab on its northwestern end. A few moments later the first drops of rain arrived. And don’t ask who Bill was, ’cause I never found out. On strange phrases, I learnt a new word today – ‘quockerwodger’…
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“Love, and look after it!”
I usually wake up to the Farming Today programme on Radio 4. On Saturdays, it is a bit of a compilation and 45 minutes later so I’m less philogrobolized than on a weekday. The first ten minutes or so this morning was about the trashing of the countryside that many of us have observed during…
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The Giant’s Boot
Northern Ireland’s most visited attraction is the iconic Giant’s Causeway, polygonal columns of basaltic rock formed sixty million years ago when molten lava spread across the land and created clouds of steam on meeting the sea. The lava cooled and began to solidify into basalt. While most tourists only get as far as the Causeway…