Category: Roseberry Topping
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Merry Mōdraniht
Christmas seems to arrive earlier every year. This Christmas Eve the summit was packed to the rafters. This view follows the line of the old ironstone tramway. Now labelled a Permissive Path, it runs alongside the Public Bridleway that is Aireyholme Lane and is largely ignored, so it feels like just a box-ticking exercise. Long…
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A Glimpse of a Windhover
Despite spending at least two hours outdoors on most days, close meetings with nature are actually quite thin on the ground. There is the odd distant view, a brief flicker at the edge of sight, usually gone before my patience can catch up. My bird identification skills are basic, but even I know this much.…
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A Long View from Cockle Scar
Scar, scarp and escarpment have a knack for muddling people. The landforms overlap, and to add to the fun a scarp can carry several scars on its own back. Despite how they look, scar is not related to the other two. It comes from the Old Norse “sker”, meaning crag, with a nod to “sgeir”.…
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Roseberry Watching Over Enclosed Land
The nearest field in today’s photograph marks the site of the old farmstead of Summerhill, born out of Great Ayton’s enclosure of the common land in 1658. At that time, the commons stretched all the way to the top of Roseberry, open and shared in a way that would soon vanish. The enclosure was carried…
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Before Satellites Spoilt the Fun: The Rise of Triangulation
Trig points cling to hilltops like relics from a time when humans trusted metal and masonry rather than shining toys orbiting the earth. This one on Roseberry’s summit keeps being repainted in traditional white, only to be graffited again by passing aritists who imagine posterity cares about their scribblings. With GPS now doing the clever…
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December Arrives and Haws for the Birds
And so we stumble into December, once the proud tenth month of a Roman calendar designed by people who thought it wise to leave sixty days of winter adrift like sheep in a snow drift. Eventually they realised this was a fool’s errand, tacked on January and February, and shuffled December to twelfth place. One…
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Little Roseberry and an Echo of Old Norse
From this viewpoint on Ryston Bank the knoll of Little Roseberry takes on a presence rather more commanding than its shy appearance on the O.S. Map, where it is denied even a ring contour. If the name Roseberry grew out of “Othenesberg”, the Old Norse for Odin’s Hill, it seems a touch peculiar that its…
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Solitude on Roseberry
The summit of Roseberry lay in an uncanny hush this morning, hidden beneath a dense veil of cloud that turned the familiar rocks into something resembling a far-off alpine mountain. The first snow of winter was still drifting down in slow, wavering flakes, a little damp but enthralling nonetheless. The whole scene felt charged with…
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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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RIP SKIPPY: A Memorial Nobody Wants
Just below the summit of Roseberry Topping—a name that sounds like a pudding but is in fact Teesside’s iconic hill—there’s a large crag sandstone, rock that was laid down millions of years ago. The hill itself has only existed for twenty thousand or so, which makes it practically new money in geological terms. Moss and…