Category: North York Moors
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Under the Beech: Kildale’s Tribute to the Fallen of WW2
In the quiet heart of Kildale stands this modest stone shelter. Walkers on the Cleveland Way pause here to rest, unwrap their sandwiches, and watch the rain fall. Each morning, local children gather beneath its roof, waiting for the school buses to Stokesley or Ingleby Greenhow, their laughter echoing through the valley. Today, it also…
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The Mermaids of Staithes
Staithes clings to the North Yorkshire cliffs like a stubborn barnacle, its narrow alleys and huddled cottages whispering tales of smugglers, storms, and shipwrecks. Once a modest “staith” — a landing place for Seaton, a settlement mentioned in the Domesday Book — the village grew around its tiny harbour, its people as resilient as the…
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Brackenberry Wyke: Low Tide Quarrying
Only when the sea has receded at low tide can one safely pick a path along the foot of the cliffs at Brackenberry Wyke. Here lie the ghostly remains of the old ironstone workings, where men once hacked at the exposed seams before hauling their spoil through an adit to join the great warren of…
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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…
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Nettle Wood in Autumn’s Glow
Nettle Hole: Two modest parcels of woodland lie beside Cliff Ridge Wood, gifted to the National Trust in 1991 by Lady Fry for the princely sum of ten pounds. A bargain, one might say, for a place that now looks splendid in autumn, its beech saplings blazing away where once nettles ruled. Farmers, of course,…
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The Forgotten Lichenologist of Great Ayton: William Mudd
Watching over this popular approach to Easby Moor stand a pair of weathered gateposts, their stone faces mottled with centuries of lichen. They guard the path with the weary dignity of old sentinels, and one cannot help but wonder: did they stand here before Captain Cook’s Monument was raised on the hill beyond? The answer,…
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Shale, Sandstone and a Coffee Cup
I set out this morning hoping to capture a clear view of the mound on Roseberry’s western slope, formed by the landslip of May 1912. The result was underwhelming; the photograph failed to do justice to the defining shape of the old slump. During the second week of that May, a great section of Roseberry’s…
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Urra: What’s in a Name?
Urra. A name that sounds as if the wind itself whispered it across the moor. Once, according to Richard Blakeborough, this lonely hamlet in upper Bilsdale had a blacksmith and an inn – the twin hearts of any small community. Now it is little more than a name on a map, clinging to the edge…
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The Watchers of the Plain: Highcliff Nab in the Stone Age Landscape
From Gisborough Moor, Highcliff Nab rises starkly above the Cleveland Plain, and it is easy to imagine the lives of its earliest visitors, the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who roamed here during six millennia before 4000 BC — 900 years before Stonehenge was even thought about. Highcliff Nab is recognised as a key site of Early Mesolithic…
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The View from the Hanging Stone
About a mile north of Over Silton, on the steep flank of Thimbleby Banks, stands a curious mass of stone known as the Hanging Stone. It is a great angular block of coarse grit, so boldly poised that it seems to hover in mid-air. Were it not hidden by the thick wood below, one might…