Category: Guisborough
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Tinghou: From Meeting Place to Housing Estate
Not the most flattering view for today, I will admit. A quiet field, currently earning its keep as horse pasture, pressed up against Lowcross Farm. I took the photograph for two reasons, neither of them aesthetic. First, for the record. This field sits under a planning application for a new estate of 117 houses. If…
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Viaducts, Violence and Victory: How Rival Railways Fought for Cleveland
The old viaduct at Slapewath stands forlorn and overgrown. It looks peaceful now. Built in 1861 by the Cleveland Railway, it sat at the centre of one of the fiercest railway battles in the north of England. By the time the Middlesbrough & Guisborough Railway was running, one thing was clear. It was not going…
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The Station That Was Not for the Plebs: How Guisborough Got a Railway, Reluctantly
The photograph shows an overgrown piece of railway history: the remains of the private station, built not for a town, but for Sir Alfred Edward Pease of Hutton Hall. It is a neat place to begin, because it tells you almost everything about how the railway first came to Guisborough. In 1850, Guisborough had no…
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Life Support for a “Green and Pleasant Land”
A gloomy photograph for a gloomy day in a gloomy month. The sky is doing that flat grey thing, the sort that drains the colour out of everything. As if on schedule, the news has joined in, with fresh misery arriving from across the Atlantic, where the headlines manage to sink the mood even further.…
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Lost Without Moving: Britain’s Wandering North
A cracking morning. This view looks north-east from Newton Moor, over Guisborough, out to the North Sea and whatever lies beyond it, behaving impeccably for once. “Grid to mag, add; mag to grid, get rid” is the sort of mnemonic that lodges in the brain for life, usually thanks to the Cubs and a damp…
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The Watchers of the Plain: Highcliff Nab in the Stone Age Landscape
From Gisborough Moor, Highcliff Nab rises starkly above the Cleveland Plain, and it is easy to imagine the lives of its earliest visitors, the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who roamed here during six millennia before 4000 BC — 900 years before Stonehenge was even thought about. Highcliff Nab is recognised as a key site of Early Mesolithic…
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Panis Porcinus: Bread for Pigs, Medicine for Men
The common names we give to plants often say less about science and more about superstition. Take fleabane. Its title comes from the old belief that dried stems would drive away fleas. Toothwort was thought to cure toothache, not through any chemical virtue, but because its flowers looked rather like teeth. The Autumn-flowering Cyclamen carries…
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The Slow Decay of Belmont Mine
It is disheartening to see the old mine buildings at Belmont Ironstone Mine partially collapsed. Built around 1909, they may not be the grandest examples of industrial architecture, but they are likely the most intact surface remains of any ironstone mine in the Cleveland area. Remarkably, some sections are still used as stables. In the…
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The Priory Gatehouse: Overshadowed but Not Forgotten
I had reason to visit Guisborough today and took the chance to walk around the old priory. I have posted before of its great east wall—impressive as it is, it remains only a fragment of what must once have been a formidable complex. The priory met its end in 1540 with the Dissolution. Ten years…
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Temperature Inversions and Timetable Errors
A glorious morning on the hills south of Guisborough, the so-called top of Belmangate. While the town wallowed in cold and damp misery, those above the temperature inversion were treated to the breathtaking sight of Eston Nab and Airy Hill rising like islands from the clouds, with a diffused Brocken spectre thrown in for good…