Category: North York Moors
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Chop Gate: Pedlars, Vikings and a Farmer’s Opinion
Chop Gate sits quietly in Bilsdale until the TT roars through and reminds everyone it exists. But the village has a quieter puzzle that never goes away: nobody can agree on what to call it, or what it means. Travel guides and linguists will tell you confidently that it is pronounced “Chop Yat.” The reasoning…
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Coast to Coast Opens — But Not For All
The Coast to Coast is now an official National Trail. Years of effort, a considerable sum of public money, and another grand ceremony. But one writer greets the opening carrying not a celebratory banner but a rather pointed question: Who, exactly, is it for? Charlotte Ditchburn is happy to acknowledge that these routes bring people…
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Lewis Hunton: The Boy Who Read the Rocks
Stand on the site of the old Loftus Alum Works and you feel rather small. These 213-metre cliffs are not pretty. For centuries, workers burned shale and processed aluminium sulphate here, poisoning the ground so thoroughly that almost nothing grows. The place looks dead. It seems more of the remains of the seeping pits and…
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Bloworth Slack—Not as Lazy as It Sounds
Bloworth Slack, just moments before it meets Badger Gill to become Hodge Beck. Bransdale again — but today we’ve been beside this quietly lovely woodland stream, its amber rocks lit by a sky so clear it almost seems rude. I never took Geography at ‘O’ Level. I was a science boy, apparently, and Geography was…
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The Duncombe Drive: Lost in Plain Sight
Repairs to fencing offered a rare glimpse into a part of Bransdale not open to the public. The photograph shows Hall Plantation, where a line of beech trees accentuates what is clearly an old trackway, its course still visible beneath a deep carpet of last year’s leaves. The track has been sitting quietly here since…
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Lady Day: When England Turned Over a New Leaf
March 25th was not just another date. It was the day England once held its breath, then exhaled. Until 1751, Lady Day was the legal New Year. Winter ended. Debts were called in. Contracts expired. The nation lurched back to life like a cart horse after a long cold stable. Rents fell due, farm tenancies…
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The Pale — Playground of the Percys
Viewed here from Percy Cross Rigg, Capt. Cook’s Monument is just about visible on the highest point of Easby Moor. This eastern end, in the parish of Kildale, is known as Coate Moor and those unforested fields on the spur are labelled “The Pale” on Ordnance Survey maps. It is a relic of one of…
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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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Farndale: Rather Less Yellow Than Expected
Last Friday’s trip to Farndale, home of the famous wild daffodils was, if truth be told, rather a mixed blessing. The display was, shall we say, not quite the riot of yellow one might have hoped for. The far bank of the River Dove, where the public cannot go, looked considerably more impressive. Years of…
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Iron Age on the Moors: Percy Rigg’s Hidden Houses
For centuries, five Iron Age round houses sat quietly on this ridge in North Yorkshire, and nobody noticed. Not bad for a neighbourhood that was probably occupied for over 300 years. The site was only spotted in 1962, when Fred Proud of Sleddale Farm found it and reported it to local archaeologists Roland Close and…