Tag: wood
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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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Greenhow Botton
On the old 1857 O.S. map, this area is named as Greenhow Burton. Half a century later, it is mapped as Greenhow Botton. Such is the evolution of names over time. Or perhaps different surveyors misinterpreting the local dialect. The second word of the name derives from the Old Norse ‘Botn’ meaning a hollow. Off…
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Boxing Day
Everyone knows that Boxing Day originated from the practice of distributing the contents of the Christmas Box that had been placed in churches in the days preceding Christmas for casual offerings. The box money would be opened on Christmas Day and the contents doled out the next day, St. Stephen’s Day, by priests to the poor.…
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Sandbeds Plantation
There’s something about a beech woodland is that is magical. Strong low sunshine creating long shadows on a winter carpet of leaves. I know this is not a natural landscape, Sandbeds Plantation above the village of Kildale below Coate Moor. The uniformity of the elegant trunks is a giveaway, probably planted sometime in the late…
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Guisborough from Hanging Stone
Following yesterday’s post featuring a quotation from William Camden’s 1586 book ‘Britannia’, his guide to the British Isles, I thought I should post about what he had to say about Guisborough and the alum industry, which, in the Elizabethan times, was still a novelty. This is the first half of the paragraph following yesterday’s quotation.…
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Who was this Guy Fawkes anyway?
I posted yesterday that Bonfire Night developed in celebration of the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot. Re-reading it, this sort of implied that it was unplanned public rejoicing, but although the first bonfires may have been lit spontaneously soon after he was captured as news quickly spread throughout the city, soon afterward Parliament made it…
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Kalsarikännit
A Finnish word for that feeling you have when you spend the evening getting drunk at home alone in your underwear, with no intention of going out. The word came to me when this afternoon when I was so attired, log fire blazing away. The beer came later. I had returned home tired and weary…
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Dry hedging in Newton Wood
A tiring day in Newton Wood on the main route up Roseberry making some dry hedges from cut sycamore saplings. Dry hedges are basically a wall of branches weaved between stakes. They provide good habitat for all small mammals and insects but the primary aim for these hedges is to encourage visitors not to wander…
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Nan Scaife o’ Spaunton Moor
“Get you of the skull the bone part of a gibbetted man so much as one ounce which you will dry and grind to a powder until when searced it be as fine as wheatenmeal, this you will put away securely sealed in a glass vial for seven years. You will then about the coming…
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Newton Woods
An early climb up Roseberry and back through Newton Wood looking glorious in its autumn colours, oak leaves refusing to fall. Overcast and dull. Open Space Web-Map builder Code