Category: Bilsdale
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Stone Ruck
A rather dull morning but I somehow managed to miss the downpour. The high moors have somewhat woolly boundaries. Sometimes they follow the meandering of streams and other natural features, elsewhere they may be a straight line between landmarks drawn in an office or mapped as “Undefined”. The parish boundary between Whorlton and Bilsdale West…
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St Hilda, Bilsdale Priory
A wet miserable day so I’ve had to resort to architectural interest. This is St. Hilda’s Church, Bilsdale, built in the mid-19th-century replacing an earlier 12th-century one. I didn’t look but there is a stone above the porch doorway, which reads: “COONDDIT ECLEE SIAAM WIILLELMVVS NOBLIS ISTAA OO INTEMERRATE NOOMMIINNE SCE VIIRGINNIIS HILDE” This evidently…
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Bilsdale-Midcable
Bilsdale is a dale of two halves. Or should that be two ends? At the top is the ‘hamlet’ of Bilsdale-Kirkham. Lower down is Bilsdale-Midcable, a ‘chapelry’, the name is a corruption of “Media Capella,” a middle or midway chapel, probably an ancient chapel-of-ease in the adjoining parish of Harome. In 1132 , at the…
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Long lost pubs of Chop Gate
The most substantive village in Bilsdale. The name, Chop Gate, pronounced ‘Chop Yat‘ in the vernacular, is thought to be derived from the Old English ‘ceap‘, which means a pedlar (chapman), hence the ‘pedlar’s road’. Perhaps this indicates that maybe once numerous trackways converged here from across the moors and the village was a thriving…
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Raisdale
Looking down Raisdale from the back of Cringle Moor. The plan was to descend to the farm, High Clay (left of centre in the photo) and pick up the Public Footpath but the bracken proved uninviting. One thing that I hadn’t realised before and evident in this photo by the spoil heap (right of centre)…
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Mount Vittoria, Garfitt Gap and Hasty Bank
Today is the 200th anniversary of the death of Napoléon Bonaparte, aged 51, whilst in exile on the island of St Helena in the middle of the Atlantic. The autopsy concluded he died of stomach cancer, but some believe he was killed by arsenic poisoning. This may not have been as sinister as it sounds,…
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Bilsdale
On me bike today. Passing through Bilsdale on the way to Hawnby I remembered this 18th-century song I came across the other day: The BILSDALE FARMER. THERE was an old Farmer in Bilsdale did dwell He had but one Daughter a beauty excell. And many caming a courting but all to her ruin. But still…
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On this day in 1933
“It was icy cold in Munich on New Year’s Day [1933]. Adolf Hitler was drinking coffee over breakfast at his luxurious apartment at 16 Prinzregentenplatz. The morning papers made gloomy reading about his political prospects in the coming year. A critical article in the social democratic newspaper Vorwärts headlined ‘Hitler’s Rise and Fall’ suggested the…
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Sheep House, below Medd Crag, Bilsdale
It seems to me that it is quite uncommon in the North York Moors to have a barn for housing sheep remote from the farmyard, unlike, say, the cow-houses of the Yorkshire Dales. And as barns go this is quite a long one, undivided, just one long space. Built sometime in the late 19th-century, perhaps…
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There’s some good snow drifts on Carr Ridge …
… on the way up to Urra Moor. Solid enough to bare my weight … almost. It was fun until the crust gives way and I end up with a face plant. The ruined dry-stone wall marks the boundary between the parishes of Bilsdale Midcable and Ingleby Greenhow and a dressed stone declares the land…