Tag: snow
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Quiz time: what is a scud?
If you’d have asked me a week or so ago, I would have said a Scud was a Soviet Union designed ballistic missiles used in the Iraq war. I have since learnt that a scud is a glider, a low-level detached, irregular cloud, and an acronym that is too crude for me to repeat here,…
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Deck the halls with boughs of holly, Fa la la la la la la la!
It’s been a bumper year for all sorts of fruits and berries, and the holly is no exception. I was fascinated by this holly bush on Ryston Bank — the northern slope of Little Roseberry. Its branches are laden with bright red berries. In the distance is the flat topped Bousdale Hill with its fields…
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Clear felling on Little Ayton Moor has opened up super views across Great Ayton Moor all the way to Highcliff Nab
A light overnight snowfall hides the debris from the forestry work. I guess the remainder of the forestry will go in due course. Great Ayton Moor has a wealth of archaeological features which I’ve posted about many times before. A chambered cairn, a cairnfield , an Iron Age enclosure, and numerous tumuli. Elgee thought that…
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Carr Ridge, Urra Moor
It is recorded that this standing stone is a “Post Medieval” waymarker. A stone has stood over 450 winters reassuring travellers across the bleak Urra Moor, the highest point of the North York Moors. The only sound that broke the muffling of the cloud was the frequent ‘go-back, back, back‘ call of the Red grouse…
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There is nothing as exhilerating as being out in the snow
Well ok, it was only a smattering, a ‘greymin‘, barely enough to cover the rocks on this Bronze Age tumulus on Great Ayton Moor. ” ‘Twas frost and thro leet wid a o’ greymin snaw“. On my walk up Roseberry through Newton Wood, the feathery pruinescence of the dead bracken fonds meant I was not…
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Newton Wood
Woke up to snow this morning. The last kick of winter? By half nine the melt had begun.
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On this day, in 1971, the end of an era
As we further attempt to cocoon ourselves from the European project, now may be the time to think again about that disastrous venture that happened on this day in 1971, fifty years ago. Decimalisation was the brainchild of Ted Heath’s Tory Government, plunging the country into chaos. Overnight the old currency of pounds, shillings and…
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Rivelingdale from Potters Ridge
The image belies the buffeting I was getting by the bitter wind. I was on Potters Ridge, a small 24m high prominence of Guisborough Moor. Highcliff Nab is at the north-western end, and views of Sleddale and Rivelingdale on the southern, the ridge bisected by the forestry boundary fence. I am currently reading ‘Sapiens’ by…
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Lonsdale
Sylvia Plath tragically ended her life on this day in 1963. She was a 30 year old American poet, coping on her own in a house in London with two tiny children by the future Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes who had left her the previous year. She’d had some success as a poet, the Observer…
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I learnt a new word today …
Galeanthropy – the belief that you have become into a cat. A delusion. Not that you can turn into a cat at will, like a witch’s familiar, like Professor McGonagall from Harry Potter. That would be therianthropy. Therianthropy, another new word, is the belief in the ability to change into any animal. This shamanic belief…