Category: Fylingdales Moor
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Draped in Hessian: The Prehistoric Double Dyke of Shooting House Rigg
This Bronze Age boundary has stood on Shooting House Rigg for three thousand years without needing emergency intervention. Six weeks of flames stripped away the heather and burned through the protective peat blanket. Now rain washes the bare earth directly into the valley. Conservationists have draped hessian fabric over the outer bank in a desperate…
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Louven Howe
Walk north from Lilla Cross, along the track known as “Whitby Old Road”, and you reach Louven Howe, also called Louvain Cross. The boundary stone here carries a carved Maltese Cross. Beside it, someone has dug a stone-lined pit straight through the Bronze Age round barrow, and its mouth sits some six feet above the…
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Bombs, Burning, and Blame on Fylingdales Moor
This photo taken on Shooting House Rigg shows the blackened moorland fifteen months after fire swept across twenty-five square kilometres of North Yorkshire. Grass and moss are the first to recolonise. Not long after, I think I saw a hen harrier foraging over bracken along the beck. Its conspicuous white patch on its rump the…
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RAF Fylingdales and The Big Freeze of 1963
As we batten down the hatches in preparation for Storm Isha, the more mature of you might remember the so-called ‘Big Freeze of 1963‘, during the winter of that year. It stood as one of the coldest winters since the notorious one of 1946/7. Temperatures plummeted, leading to the freezing of lakes and rivers. The…
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Lilla Cross – A Tale of Loyalty and Bravery
On a day that turned out so dreich that even a duck would not be happy, a tramp across Fylingdales Moor to Lilla Cross might have seemed a good idea when we set off. No wind whistled across the heather, but instead there were faint echoes of woeful cries that must have reverberated through the…
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Ramsdale Stone Circle
How many stones make a stone circle? These three standing stones on the appropriately named Standing Stones Rigg on Fylingdales Moor are known as the Ramsdale Stone Circle. Ramsdale being the name of a hamlet and a beck that eventually flows into the North Sea at Boggle Hole. It is not known if there were…
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Prehistoric cross dyke, Fylingdales Moor
Fylingdales Moor is a huge area of heather moorland owned by the Strickland Estate but managed by the Hawk and Owl Trust as a conservation area using “traditional moorland management techniques”. The moor contains many archaeological features. The largest is this prehistoric cross dyke, three parallel ditches with earthbanks between, 780m long. Often the uniformity…