Category: Cleveland Hills
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Who Gets the Land? Everyone Wants a Piece
Britain has a land problem. There is not enough of it, what there is in the wrong place, and far too many people want it for far too many things — housing, food, energy, nature, and apparently shooting birds for fun. The Government has finally noticed and published its first Land Use Framework: a long-term…
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Cloudfall
Up on the moors above Greenhow Botton today, where the Cleveland Hills were doing their best impression of a waterfall in the clouds. The kind of view that makes the uphill pedal entirely worth it. Just another quiet Wednesday on the North York Moors. At the head of the valley lies Midnight Corner, which never…
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Cold Moor: A Close Brush with Industry
Cold Moor today looks like the sort of place that looks as though history slipped it by. Green, quiet, and peaceful. You would never guess how close it came to becoming a roaring industrial scar. In 1911 the calm nearly ended. Plans were laid to turn this part of Lord Feversham’s vast estate into an…
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Gribdale Gate and the Edge of the Ice
A view from Cliff Rigg looking across to Gribdale Gate and Easby Moor, where the monument to Captain James Cook stands like a stubborn finger pointing at the sky. It is a landscape that seems quiet until you realise how much has happened here while humanity was busy elsewhere. Gribdale Gate is a well known…
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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…