Category: North York Moors
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The Little Used Footpath to Sleddale
Penrod Hill is a high point on Gisborough Moor, and a public footpath drops from it into Sleddale, a valley boxed in by moor on every side. The name comes from the old English word “slaed”, meaning a wide, flat valley. A lonely farmstead sits at the bottom, cut off from the rest of the…
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High Bloworth, with a view down Bransdale
Sheep have shaped the British uplands for centuries. Their grazing, by cattle too and, in the Tabular Hills, rabbits, kept the moors open and thriving. Now a proper row has broken out over how many sheep the moors can bear. Farmers say the recent drop in numbers is asking for trouble. Fewer sheep, more gorse…
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1953: The Moors Were Burning Then, Too
Moorland fires have a way of making headlines only for as long as the ground stays dry. This summer’s blazes filled the news for weeks, and then some rain came and the story simply went quiet, whether that counts as relief or amnesia is anyone’s guess. What follows is an article from the Cleveland Standard,…
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Garfit Gap—The Ready-Made Cathedral of Cleveland
It looks like our Neolithic ancestors were quite fond of the easy option. While others were breaking their backs moving megaliths elsewhere in the country, the tribes in Cleveland opted for a “minimalist, energy-saving policy” for their rituals. They viewed this jagged outcrop of The Wainstones as a “ready made ritual landscape”. Nature had done…
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Gravity Strikes Again
Word on the street was that a subsidence hole had opened up near the summit of Roseberry Topping. Naturally, I decided to go and have a look. On the face of it, it was not especially dramatic. No great chasm had opened beneath the summit and swallowed half of Cleveland. Still, the hole was deep…
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A Riot of Purple, and a Man with No Clothes
A fine display of blooming heather around Captain Cook’s Monument, on a moor left unmanaged for grouse shooting. Here is a strange tale I have come across. In November 1856, the York Herald reported that a fine young man, plainly out of his senses, had been found near Lockwood Beck on the Whitby road. He…
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The Legend of Oswy’s Well
The ghost footpath post last week got me thinking about Roseberry Well, tucked near the summit on the northern side. It has been a fair while since I last went up — or rather down, since the best approach is from above — though it is not the sort of thing likely to have wandered…
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Bronze Age Guesswork on Wayworth Moor
The Moors are littered with standing stones, and behind each is its own little mystery. Some mark old routes. Some are gateposts that have outlived their gates. A few might be medieval crosses, worn down by weather and time until nobody can be certain. Others seem to have drawn an arbitrary line in the earth…
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Whorl Hill and its Buried Treasure
Scarth Wood Moor. Third Thursday running. Too hot for ditch digging, and my back agreed with the thermometer. An early finish saved the day, though. A glance over the wall gave up a proper reward: Whorl Hill, sat there like a pudding basin turned upside down, the glacial leftover that gave Whorlton parish its name.…
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A Ghost Path up Roseberry
Maps are meant to be read, not buried in an app on a phone. I was doing exactly that the other day when I spotted something odd on the OS sheet: a Public Footpath, marked bold as brass, striking up Roseberry from the north-east. No one walks that way. So naturally I set off to…