Category: Roseberry Topping
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Thirty Years of Flying Stones and Gravel
The upgrading of the Public Bridleway that climbs the steep eastern flank of Roseberry Topping appears to be finished, though those boulders need time to settle before local lads discover a bowling alley. Overhead, a helicopter carries tubs of gravel from the Aireyholme Lane dump to a clearing in Newton Woods, ready for the next…
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Bridle Gill Road
Follow this sunken holloway downhill to Newton-under-Roseberry and the terrain gives a hint of its age. Gorse and scrubby trees crowd the banks. Between them the track lies deep, worn down by centuries of boots, hooves and heavy loads. Nobody wears down a trench like that by a Sunday stroll up Roseberry. Today it is…
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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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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…
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Gravity Strikes Again
Word on the street was that a subsidence hole had opened up near the summit of Roseberry Topping. Naturally, I decided to go and have a look. On the face of it, it was not especially dramatic. No great chasm had opened beneath the summit and swallowed half of Cleveland. Still, the hole was deep…
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The Legend of Oswy’s Well
The ghost footpath post last week got me thinking about Roseberry Well, tucked near the summit on the northern side. It has been a fair while since I last went up — or rather down, since the best approach is from above — though it is not the sort of thing likely to have wandered…
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A Ghost Path up Roseberry
Maps are meant to be read, not buried in an app on a phone. I was doing exactly that the other day when I spotted something odd on the OS sheet: a Public Footpath, marked bold as brass, striking up Roseberry from the north-east. No one walks that way. So naturally I set off to…
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A Crow’s Foot on a Gatepost
The gate itself is nothing to write home about. Seven metal bars, a stone post, the sort of thing you would walk past without a second glance. The gatepost once had a partner, another “stoup” standing guard on the other side, but that would have got hauled out years ago so tractors could squeeze through.…
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The Squeeze: Roseberry Topping’s Disappearing Footpath
Climbing Roseberry Topping ought to be one of the simple joys in life. Not on this stretch. Here it is a “stinging” ordeal, and no mistake. A modern post-and-wire fence runs alongside a maturing line of hedge saplings, squeezed in next to the old boundary. They were planted a few years back. The result now…
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Ragwort: The Weed That Feeds the Bees
Three heatwaves have hit Britain since spring, baking the ground and warming the seas. Humidity makes it feel worse. Soil has dried fast, wildfire risk is high, and marine life is under strain too. The Met Office, says cooler air is due soon, but rain is not, so dry days continue. Some plants seem to…