Category: North York Moors
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Crosscliffe: The Prince, the Pellet, and the Pitch
The Crosscliffe Valley looks a quiet place. It was not so quiet on a Tuesday in 1915. A stray pellet from a grouse shoot hit the Jam Sahib of Nawanagar. He lost his right eye. This was a bit of a problem for a man who was reputed to be one of the greatest cricketers…
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Byland Abbey
Cars rattle through this narrow arch on the road from Oldstead, and hardly a driver spares it a glance. Yet this squeeze of stone is Byland Abbey‘s Inner Gatehouse, and in its day nobody passed through without good reason. Getting into the monastery was never a casual affair. The whole precinct sat behind a high wall,…
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The Inclosure Act 1845: The Making of the Working Class
On this day in 1845, Parliament handed over vast stretches of common land with barely a backward glance. The Inclosure Act set up a new breed of official, the enclosure commissioner, who no longer needed Parliament’s blessing for every land grab. One rubber stamp did the job from then on. The scale of it is…
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Kilburn’s White Horse
Everyone assumes the horse is ancient. Some pagan relic, carved by shadowy ancestors for reasons lost to the mists of time. Wrong, as it happens. The Kilburn horse was the work of one Thomas Taylor, a local boy who left for London, made his fortune, and came home with an idea instead of sense. He…
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Scarth Nick: Where Crowds Once Gathered
Scarth Nick sits in the Cleveland Hills like an open door open, and folk have been trudging through it since before anyone thought to write things down. Ancient wanderers used it. The Romans probably used it. By the Middle Ages it had become a drove road, with cattle plodding through where prehistoric feet once did.…
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Friga’s Little Valley: Still with its Ironstone
The North York Moors dales are broader than you expect, every single time. Stand on Danby Rigg and look down at Little Fryup Dale and you will see exactly what I mean: a proper patchwork quilt of a valley, laid out below like someone tipped a box of green and gold offcuts onto the hillside.…
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Unmanaged Blaze on Hutton Moor
Experts love a crisis. Last year, the tiny heather beetle was going to end the world as we know it. They claimed the infestation had turned the moors into a massive tinderbox of kindling—they may well have been right. But they also predicted a grey, withered future for the purple foliage. They were a bit…
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Yorkshire Day and a Flag That Behaves Itself
Here we are, then. The World Cup finished weeks ago, the face paint is long gone, yet flags are still tie-wrapped to lamp-posts and hung from windows like a rash that will not clear up. During the football, everyone let it slide. Bunting, jolly, harmless. The tournament is over now, though, and flags remain, and…
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The Swidden That Would Not Turn Purple
Here, on Great Ayton Moor, a swidden burnt a few seasons back to bring on fresh heather for the grouse. But judging by the tussocks, deer-grass had other plans. The plan was for heather — tender purple shoots laid on like a buffet for red grouse. What grew back was this: a spiky green swathe…
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The Symbolic Shield: Decoding the 800-Metre Wall of Scarth Wood Moor
Scarth Wood Moor looks like empty, timeless terrain, but under the heather sits what used to be a busy Bronze Age settlement. This worn line of boulders belongs to an orthostatic wall, which is a fancy way of saying a prehistoric boundary made from big standing stones placed at even gaps. Frank Elgee first noted…