Category: Bransdale
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Elm Houses: A Story of Two Bransdale Farms
Tucked into a remote part of Bransdale, Elm Houses has a history worth telling. What is today one tidy holiday cottage surrounded by idle farm buildings was once two entirely separate farms: High and Low Elm House. On the right stands High Elm House, a long 18th-century range. A lintel stone dated 1780 records its…
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Valley Garden: Bluebells, Bog Plants and a Baffling Fern
In the early 1950s, Lord Feversham had a rather splendid idea. To keep his staff at Bransdale Lodge busy, he ordered a “wild garden” to be carved out of Gimmer Bank Wood, on the soggy banks of Blowith Slack, a tributary of Hodge Beck. In went azaleas, rhododendrons, flowering cherries and a good deal more…
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A New Corner of Bransdale
Someone went to extraordinary lengths to block up what was once a field gate. It sits in a tangle of old inbye fields to the west of St. Catherine’s House in Bransdale. The field boundaries appear on the oldest Ordnance Survey maps, so the dry-stone wall and its two gateposts, or “stoops”, were almost certainly…
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Cockayne: The Land of Milk, Honey, and Mumbling Clerks
Medieval peasants dreamed of a place called Cockaigne — a land of luxury and ease where roasted pigs wandered about with knives in their backs to make carving easy, grilled geese flew directly into one’s mouth, and the wine flowed freely. Streets paved with pastry. Skies that rained cheese. You get the idea. Then someone…
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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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The Art of Dry-Stone Walling
It is widely held that the valleys of Rosedale, Farndale, Bilsdale and here in Bransdale show not the faintest scratch of glacial meddling. While the ice sheets rampaged around Yorkshire like uninvited guests, the North York Moors sat apart, dry and stubborn, an island that refused to drown. Geologists cling to an old rule, which…
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Among the Tree Guards of Bransdale
In Bransdale today, work continued among the ranks of tree guards set out over recent winters. The task was to fell the self-seeded conifer saplings that have spread so thickly through this corner of Bloworth Wood. New woodland does not simply grow and look after itself; it demands steady, patient management. From the valley floor,…
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Filling the Gaps on a Bransdale Hillside
A return to Bransdale, where last winter the National Trust planted 6,000 saplings onto the steep side of Bloworth Slack. The site had been clear-felled, a blank but messy page waiting for a better story than rows of timber grown for profit. To give the youngsters a fighting chance, the usual tree guards went in.…
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Breck House and an Athletic John Brown
A blocked road just north of Helmsley forced us into a long and meandering detour on our way to Bonfield Ghyll. Still, it offered the consolation of fresh glimpses of familiar country. This is Breck House in upper Bransdale, a solid stone-built Moors farmhouse dating to after 1850. Yet an estate survey from 1782 records…