Category: Great Ayton
-
Great Ayton’s Boxing Day Ritual: Auf Wiedersehen?
In 2004, hunting foxes with dogs was banned. This did not, however, end the “sport”. It merely trimmed it back and left three flavours of “hunting” on the menu. First comes trail hunting. This involves following a scent of animal urine laid on a route that is meant to be unknown to the riders. In theory,…
-
Merry Mōdraniht
Christmas seems to arrive earlier every year. This Christmas Eve the summit was packed to the rafters. This view follows the line of the old ironstone tramway. Now labelled a Permissive Path, it runs alongside the Public Bridleway that is Aireyholme Lane and is largely ignored, so it feels like just a box-ticking exercise. Long…
-
Witches’ Butter
Even in midwinter, when the woods look like they have given up, they can still manage a bit of a show. There are splashes of colour if you bother to look. Bright fungi flare up against the gloom, set among the stubborn brown leaves still clinging to oak and beech, and the thick brown carpet…
-
Roseberry Watching Over Enclosed Land
The nearest field in today’s photograph marks the site of the old farmstead of Summerhill, born out of Great Ayton’s enclosure of the common land in 1658. At that time, the commons stretched all the way to the top of Roseberry, open and shared in a way that would soon vanish. The enclosure was carried…
-
Crimson Herald of the Coming Sun
This is a novelty for this long-suffering blog: a photograph taken from my very own doorstep, with sunrise still twenty minutes off and the sky already plotting its little drama. Most people know the old saying about the red sky and the fortunes of sailors, with its murky origins somewhere in scripture and the occasional…
-
A Quarter Century of the Right to Roam, More or Less
Today brings a double milestone for those in England and Wales who find the open air rather more enticing than the sofa. It is twenty-five years since the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 marched through Parliament and twenty years since its promised freedoms finally reached the boots of the public. Since then, the…
-
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,…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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,…