Category: North York Moors
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Shadows Over Kildale: The Colonial Slave Trade Links with a Yorkshire Manor
Beneath the moors of the Cleveland Hills lies Kildale, a dale that looks as though nothing has ever happened there. Something did happen, though. In 1662 the estate was bought by John Turner, serjeant-at-law, of Kirkleatham. John kept to the family business of being minor Yorkshire gentry. His younger brother, William, as was the lot…
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Same Gate, Different Century
An old photograph has been doing the rounds on Facebook, so I thought I would have a go at recreating it. The original is in monochrome, underexposed and a bit fuzzy. Someone has since enhanced it with AI, and the result is far sharper. There is also a colourised version knocking about, though here the…
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Westerdale, and an unsolved crime
This is the dale where a Marsh Harrier was shot last month. Heather in the foreground, drystone walls, scattered farms, cloud resting on the tops. Nothing in the view gives the game away, which is rather the trouble. It is yet another sad reminder of the illegal persecution that still shadows Britain’s uplands. What happened…
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Danby Dale on the Equinox
I got soaked to the skin this morning, but the sky paid me back with a full rainbow over Danby Dale. Autumn showers, it seems, come with small mercies. I took the photograph at 10.28 precisely. A rainbow always sits opposite the sun, so anyone with a sense of direction can work out which way…
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Locked Up at Mount Grace
Mount Grace Priory feels like the quietest place in Yorkshire. That was rather the point. Thomas de Holland, nephew of Richard II, founded it in 1398. It is now the best surviving of the nine Carthusian houses that thrived in medieval England. The monks lived almost as hermits, spending most days alone in cells that…
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Highcliff Nab: When Mesolithic Hunters Had the Best View
Stand on this sandstone crag of Highcliff Nab today and the wind certainly finds you. Below lies Guisborough, all roofs and roads. Far off, the turbines of Redcar turn in the haze. In the 1990s, archaeologists dug into this very crag prior to the construction of a new stone footpath needed to address the severe…
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Bransdale End and the Bride on the White Ass
In the photo above, Breck House is that farmstead in the distance, over on the left, a small stone smudge against the great sweep of Bransdale. Easy to miss. Breck House is a working farmhouse, built for function, not for show, in coursed sandstone with a pantiled roof and no airs about it whatsoever. It…
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Smoke and Mirrors: Do “Cool Burns” Safeguard or Exploit the Moors?
The ewe eyes me warily across this swidden, a black patch of burnt heather on Carlton Moor. This is muirburn, the controlled burning that has scorched British hillsides for generations.. Its defenders call it stewardship, plain and simple. Burn the old heather in strips, they say, and you starve a wildfire of fuel before it…
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Faceby: A Pleasant View, an Unpleasant Ledger
Standing on Carlton Bank, looking down at the sleepy village of Faceby, you would never guess how far the money behind this view actually travelled. In my previous post on the Carlton Bank Alum Works, I traced Christopher Prissick’s fortune back through Caribbean privateering and his marriage into the Codrington sugar family, and I had…
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Margery Murpoot’s Tall Tale
Roseberry Topping is really a modest hill, yet in 1761 a fictional country girl called Margery Murpoot declared it the tallest thing going. She says so in Joseph Reed‘s farce ‘The Register Office’, a play with about as much subtlety as a brick through a window. Her exact words, dialect and all, have survived the…