Category: Cleveland Hills
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The Twisting Plume of Ingleby Greenhow
A familiar landscape, yet on a still autumnal day in the Vale of Cleveland, when not a single turbine blade so much as twitches, an unexpected sight smudges the view. A solitary plume of smoke twists into the air, unsettling in its beauty, creating a scene both ordinary and strangely unfamiliar. At first glance, it…
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Autumn: The Killing Season
Green Bank â not very green on this first day of so-called meteorological autumn. The almanac though insists that autumn does not officially begin for another three weeks, though nature is already ahead of schedule. The harvest is in, or at least half of it, since some yields are reported at a dismal fifty per…
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On this Day in 1974 â When Health & Safety Went Mad
Just over fifty years ago, in 1974, I was into my first year of full-time work. Newly settled in North Yorkshire, it may have been then that I first looked down the short, wide dale of Greenhowe, maybe from this very spot, perhaps at this very season, when the ling is beginning to flare into…
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âFlobbadob-adob ⊠Weeeeed!â
Sunflowers always remind me of Little Weed from The Flowerpot Men, a television nostalgia from my childhood. She â if that is the right word, given her ambiguous gender and equally uncertain botanical identity â played the role of quiet confidant to Bill and Ben, the babbling flowerpot duo. Like other daisies, sunflowers are composite…
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VE Day: 80 Years On
Eighty years have passed since Victory in Europe Day, a moment etched in the collective memory by black-and-white newsreels showing ecstatic crowds flooding the streets of London and other major cities. But away from the capital, in the quieter corners of Cleveland and North Yorkshire, the mood was more restrained â though no less meaningful,…
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Green Bank: Where the Ice Met its Match
Yesterdayâs post about Haggâs Gate set me off thinking, descending yet another rabbit hole: about the time the last glacier flowed down the Vale of York and slammed into the Cleveland Hills. About the time that ice sheet politely stopped at the hillsâ feet. About the time these great north and west escarpments of the…
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Haggâs Gate, Clay Bank or Whatever itâs Called This Week
Another photograph from yesterday. I am standing on White Hill, the easternmost bump of the so-called Four Sisters of the Cleveland Hills and gazing across the col at Haggâs Gate, or at least what used to be called Haggâs Gate, towards Carr Ridge and the highest point of the North York Moors on Urra Moor.…
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Jack’s Short Life: From Rural Bilsdale to the Trenches of the Great War
A view from Cold Moor to Garfit Gap. The row of sheds belong to the industrial pheasant rearing farm at Whingroves, a shining example of rural diversification, if one defines success as raising battery-bred birds for folk to shoot. In 1896, however, it was just another typical mixed farm on the North York Moors, run…
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Sir George the Dragon Slayer
A picturesque bank of cloud hung over the Cleveland Hills this St. Georgeâs Day morning. A reminder that even the sky can be more subtle than patriotic flag-wavers. St. Georgeâs Day stirs about as much feeling in me as Carlin Sunday, Plough Monday or Hocktide â curious relics of a myth-soaked past, clung to by…
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Crannimoor: A Hill, a Café, and a Case of a Misplaced Apostrophe
On Cringle or Cringley Moor, or if one wants to sound particularly archaic, Crannimoor. A Victorian writer hailing from the West Riding once claimed this was pronounced âCreenay.â As for its origin, the modern thinking is that it comes from the Old Norse âkringla,â meaning a âcircle.â However, the ever-reliable Reverend R. C. Atkinson, walking…