Category: North York Moors
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The Bluebell Meadow, Newton Wood
Not very blue in Autumn. Compare with a photo I took almost from the same spot a year and six months ago. The blues of May have been replaced by the golden hues of Autumn. Meanwhile we drift into the month of November. The word has a Latin root, novem or nine, for in the calendar of…
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Rosedale
Hallowe’en, and a trip out on the bike in search of a photo relevant to the occasion. Left the Tees Valley under a haze and found blue skies on Blakey Ridge with mists filling the south running dales of Rosedale and Farndale. Magic; who needs a commercial American import. I can’t remember making a fuss…
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Battersby Moor
In yesterdays’s posting I quoted a piece of written evidence to Parliament submitted ahead of a debate on Monday to ban driven grouse shooting. That evidence very much supported a ban on driven grouse shoots. I promised to give an opposing view so this morning so I went for a run on Battersby Moor in…
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Newton Moor
Back on my home hills after three days in the Lakes and a chance to catch up what’s been happening in the world. The news saddened me. In Langholm, in the Scottish Borders, a hen harrier has been found dead. An autopsy has been carried out on the young male, one of only three chicks raised…
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The Banana Tree
My first camera was a simple Kodak but sometime in my teens I was given, for a Xmas present, a SLR (single lens reflex) camera made by the German manufacturer Praktica. Colour film was far too expensive so I tinkered around with developing my own monochrome film in the bathroom. I experimented with filters of various shades but my favourite…
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Hutton Hall
Only appreciated in its wooded grounds from this height on Kemplah Bank. Sir Joseph Whitwell Pease, Bart, M.P., had Hutton Hall built as his country pile in 1866 which even included its own private railway station on the North Eastern Railway at Hutton Gate. The Pease money came from the railways, coal and iron, built…
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Skelton Park Pit
Very little remains of Cleveland ironstone mines. It was second only to coal as the UK’s biggest extractive industry. Ironstone had been mined in the Cleveland Hills since the 12th Century when primitive furnaces called bloomeries were used to melt the iron out of stone gained from rock outcrops along the dale sides. But it…
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The best thing about Pteridium aquilinum …
… is when it’s dying off. Bracken, carcinogenic, toxic to livestock, invasive and dominating, smothering the growth of other plants. At the height of the summer it forms an impenetrable undergrowth. Yet the autumn bracken changes to rich yellow hues. Super even on a drizzly morning.
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Red Admiral
I have’t noticed many butterflies this year. Has there been a shortage? This Red Admiral was fluttering about the ivy flowers on a hedge on Dykes Lane at Gribdale. It’s one of the last butterflies to be seen before winter sets in. Arriving in the spring from the continent nettles are a major food source for its caterpillars.…
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Newton Woods
A day spent working with the National Trust to carry out repairs to the steps on the main tourist route up Roseberry through Newton Woods. Two tonnes of hardcore hand carried up in buckets to make good the treads which had sunk due to compaction. 28 done, only 170 to go.