Category: North York Moors

  • Newly painted Roseberry trig point

    Newly painted Roseberry trig point

    Roseberry’s trig point received a fresh coat of brillant white this morning. A clean canvas for a new generation of graffiti artists. How long until the first arrives?

  • May Blossom

    May Blossom

    I hadn’t realised until recently just how short flowering seasons are. Snowdrops, Daffodils, Blackthorn. We’re just spent three weeks away. Before leaving, the Bluebells were only just beginning to carpet the woods, now they’re past their sell-by date and going to seed. Appropriately towards the end of May, the May or Hawthorn tree has burst…

  • Park Nab

    Park Nab

    On This Day 25th May 1659, “His Most Serene Highness By the Grace of God, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the Dominions thereunto belonging” the Lord Protector Richard Cromwell resigned his position. So ended our flirtation with republicanism, leading to the restoration of the monarchy and the crowning of…

  • The Cleveland Way

    The Cleveland Way

    Buy any Ordnance Survey 1:25,000 map nowadays and you’ll find it criss-crossed by lines of green diamonds — the symbol for a National Trail or Long Distance Path. In 1965, the first such trail was launched, The Pennine Way, and the second was our very own Cleveland Way, opened four years later on this day,…

  • James Emerson of Easby Hall

    James Emerson of Easby Hall

    “Charming and ingeneous” according to the ever euphuistic Pevsner, Easby Hall was built sometime between 1808 and 1823 soon after Robert Campion acquired the Lordship of the Manor. Campion was a Whitby based banker who acquired his money from shipbuilding, sail cloth manufacture and other industries. He also was responsible for the erection of Capt.…

  • ‘A Yorkshire Tragedy’

    ‘A Yorkshire Tragedy’

    I don’t usually do this view — on a sunny day it would be into the sun — but, a bit cloudy today, and with a surprising chilly wind. From Great Ayton Moor. On this day (23rd April) in 1605, Walter Calverley of Calverley Hall murdered his two sons, and seriously wounded his wife, and…

  • An old holloway up Carlton Bank

    An old holloway up Carlton Bank

    I tried to use a little used Public Footpath which loops around from the foot of Carlton Bank to the now demolished Underhill House. But I became distracted by a mountain bike track and ending zig-zagging up through the trees eventually coming across an old holloway, well above the present road. Overgrown by gorse, it…

  • More Devil’s work

    More Devil’s work

    The devil works hard so they say, but he doesn’t seem to be very good at any of his whimsical, crackpot schemes. It’s said he took a dislike of Aldborough but his ‘Arrows’ fell short and only just missed striking Boroughbridge. Then there’s his grandiose scheme for dividing the North Sea which got no further…

  • Wayworth Moor

    Wayworth Moor

    Wisps of cirrus clouds break the endless blue sky. High on the moors the world seems flat. Wayworth Moor has vague boundaries. It’s clear cut to the east, Sleddale Beck, but to the north and west, it probably falls to that part of Commondale Moor, for which Wayworth Farm has pasture rights. A reference in…

  • ‘Ohensberg’

    ‘Ohensberg’

    The bridleway between Aireyholme Farm and Hutton village, passing through the col on Roseberry Common, is referred to as ‘the great road of Ohensberg‘ in one of the foundation charters of Guisborough Priory of about 1120. The original is in medieval Latin of course but nevertheless it sounds as if it was a main route…