Category: Great Ayton
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Husband and wife trees
Thirteen years ago in February, we had snow and I was fascinated by a pair of intertwined beech saplings. Over the years one tree has dominated and has perhaps doubled in circumference whereas the subservient tree, if that is the right term, as hardly grown at all. The two trees have grafted together. The layers…
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Spring lambs
Rain, rain and more rain. So as it’s that time of the year I just had to resort to a photo cliché. Along the lane up from Fletcher’s Farm, Little Ayton. Open Space Web-Map builder Code
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Aireyholme Lane
Approaching the site of the Roseberry Ironstone Mine on the south-east flank of Roseberry Topping. Late afternoon, finally spring feels like it has arrived and the fields are beginning to drying out. The buildings, clad in corrugated steel, were located in the field on the left, with the bale of hay. Their concrete bases are…
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Great Ayton Weighbridge
I heard earlier this week that the demolition of this small building in the old goods yard at Great Ayton railway station was imminent. Yesterday’s snow might have given it a few days reprieve. It’s an old weighbridge and buried in the tangled undergrowth is, I am told, the weighing mechanism built by Henry Pooley…
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Ayton Banks Alum Works
A cold, overcast day. The fresh snow of the last few days has aged into a dirty wet surface. I found myself above Gribdale looking down on the heavily worked hillside of Cockshaw where the snow accentuated the contours of the Ayton Banks Alum Works that operated for a mere nine years in the latter…
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On Ayton Bank
The last day of February and I had had tentative thoughts of cycling into Middlesbrough to photograph the Newport Bridge for it was on this day in 1934 that the bridge was opened by the future King George VI. But more snow overnight put paid to that idea, so Plan B: head up on to…
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Ruin in Cliff Ridge Wood
Hidden in the dense undergrowth of Cliff Ridge Woods, this small ruin, with a footprint no bigger than a domestic garage, is inaccessible at the height of the summer. It has two internal “cupboards” and what could be a netty outside. Now it is tempting to assume the ruin is a relic of the whinstone…
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Super blue blood moon
“Super blue blood moon IS messing with your body – leaving men with weird dreams, women restless and everyone more hungry” so says that pinnacle of journalism, the Daily Mail. Well, it must be true then. The whole world seems to have gone hyper about this triple lunar event. Super because the moon is closest…
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The thaw begins
With the forecast expected to top 11ºc later today the thaw is well and truly underway leaving the tracks of Cliff Rigg Wood a lethal sheet of ice. Apparently, glocken is a Yorkshire term for the thaw, when the snow clears, a word derived from Old Norse. The modern Icelandic word glöggur, to become clear,…
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Feeding time at Airy Holme
A busy Sunday morning for the farmer at Aireyholme. Snow makes it difficult for stock to graze and these sheep are likely to be in lamb so it’s doubly important to provide a feed supplement which the farmer is doing by a spreader on the back of his quad choreographing the sheep like the Pied…