Category: Cleveland Hills
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The Quiet Side of the Wainstones
Folklore has a habit of latching itself to a place, especially when the landscape looks as if it needs an explanation. A strange rock, an awkward slope, a stone where no stone ought to be, and the human mind gets to work, explaining things away with a story. Few landmarks on the North York Moors…
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Cloud Duvet over the Cleveland Hills
The morning sky was as clear as one could hope for December, though the Cleveland Hills had chosen to hide beneath a bank of cloud. One could call it an orographic cloud, if one wished to sound as if one had paid attention in geography lessons. The term comes from the Greek oros for mountain,…
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A Mystery Beneath our Feet on Cold Moor
Last Sunday, the weather gods allowed a final memorable spectacle of blue skies over the North York Moors before the autumnal gloom. From the heights of Cold Moor, the view towards the Wainstones was as grand as ever, but my eye was drawn not to the distant crags, but to something rather more curious: that…
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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 — 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 — 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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“Flobbadob-adob … Weeeeed!”
Sunflowers always remind me of Little Weed from The Flowerpot Men, a television nostalgia from my childhood. She — if that is the right word, given her ambiguous gender and equally uncertain botanical identity — 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 — though no less meaningful,…
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Green Bank: Where the Ice Met its Match
Yesterday’s post about Hagg’s 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 hills’ feet. About the time these great north and west escarpments of the…
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Hagg’s Gate, Clay Bank or Whatever it’s 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 Hagg’s Gate, or at least what used to be called Hagg’s Gate, towards Carr Ridge and the highest point of the North York Moors on Urra Moor.…