Category: Great Ayton
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Echoes from the Old Workings beneath Cliff Rigg
In 1894 the Northern Echo carried a grim report of a inquest into a fatality in a whinstone quarry near Nettle Hole, a place that sits a good fifty metres below any workings that make sense on a modern map. My first thought was that the incident must point towards a tunnel beneath Aireyholme Lane,…
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Winter Transforms the Village
Fresh snow arrived over night and dressed the village with the sort of delicate filigree that flatters every scene. Even the drabbest view has been turned into something fit for a gallery. This is Station Road, usually choked with parked cars, this morning quiet and softened so completely that the few vehicles present appear to…
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God Rays over Ayton Banks
On Roseberry this morning, a well-built young chap, kitted out as if he had sprinted straight from a gym in Middlesbrough, greeted me with a cheery “Aarite, lad? Beautiful up ’ere today, init? Better than last Mondee, eh?”. His words rather floored me, not only for his unexpected use of “beautiful” but because I would…
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Nettle Wood in Autumn’s Glow
Nettle Hole: Two modest parcels of woodland lie beside Cliff Ridge Wood, gifted to the National Trust in 1991 by Lady Fry for the princely sum of ten pounds. A bargain, one might say, for a place that now looks splendid in autumn, its beech saplings blazing away where once nettles ruled. Farmers, of course,…
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The Forgotten Lichenologist of Great Ayton: William Mudd
Watching over this popular approach to Easby Moor stand a pair of weathered gateposts, their stone faces mottled with centuries of lichen. They guard the path with the weary dignity of old sentinels, and one cannot help but wonder: did they stand here before Captain Cook’s Monument was raised on the hill beyond? The answer,…
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Cliff Rigg Wood: An Old Tramway, a Broken Gate and Echoes of Cook
I thought it worth recording this path while it remains as it is—the bottom one through Cliff Rigg Wood. For posterity, as they say. It is due for “improvement” in the next few weeks, though I am not quite sure what the result will look like. The National Trust, in their grand design to upgrade…
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Aireyholme: The Humble Launchpad of Empire’s Favourite Navigator
From the summit of Roseberry Topping, the Cleveland landscape performs its finest impression of timeless rural charm: undulating green fields stitched together by hedgerows, with Aireyholme Farm sitting unobtrusively in the middle like it’s been dropped there by a distracted cartographer. This was the patch of the country where the young James Cook grew up,…
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Floods, Mills and a Sunday Flush
A flood warning late last night prompted me to wander down the village this morning and along the river. The so-called “waterfall” was in full spate, though hardly dramatic enough to warrant excitement. It is not a waterfall at all, of course, but a weir built in 1840 thanks to local benefactor Thomas Richardson. Its…
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Down among the Thistles
The hedgerows are heavy with the spoils of summer. Blackberries shine darkly in the shade, crab apples blush among the leaves, and Rowan berries hang in bright clusters. Rosebay Willowherb releases its silky seeds to the wind, while the thistles too surrender their down, sending it drifting like smoke across the fields. Thistles are cursed…
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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…