Category: Roseberry Topping
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Before the Path Gets Upgraded
Yesterday I climbed Roseberry Topping with no firm ideas, but found one on the way down. This worn path down the southeast flank is scheduled for upgrading. Not this year, perhaps, but soon enough. I wanted a record of it as it is. The path along the fence line — the one the solitary walker…
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A New View, a New Muddle
The recent clear felling of a block of forestry in Ayton Banks Wood has opened up a new view of Roseberry. The commercial timber has gone, leaving a few gangly birch trees to stand guard over the valley. It turns out that Gribdale Terrace, that isolated row of white cottages, has a history which is…
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Kirby Bank — A Hill With a Past
Bluebells pour down the sun-baked flank of Kirby Bank above the plain of Cleveland. Gorse burns yellow across the slopes. Below, the white walls of the Pybus Scout Centre gleam in the spring light. Beyond the green patchwork of fields, Roseberry Topping rises on the far horizon under a sky without a single cloud. A…
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The Last of the Lords
Roseberry Topping, North Yorkshire, 29 April 2026 — a perfect English spring morning. Out there, bluebells. In Westminster, history. Today, the current Parliament ended. And with that, seven centuries of hereditary peers sitting in the House of Lords came to a quiet end. No fanfare. No farewell parade. Just the music stopping. The story begins…
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The Pimps of Roseberry
Today’s photo is, of course, of Roseberry Topping. That dry stone wall running up the slope marks the boundary between the parishes of Newton-under-Roseberry and Great Ayton. Before the great landslip of 1912 it ran all the way to the summit. Looking at a photograph taken before 1912, you can see vegetated ground running right…
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2001: A Foot and Mouth Odyssey
25 years ago, in 2001, the country fell into an eerie stillness. Across the countryside, the “smell of death” drifted from funeral pyres as millions of animals were burned, transforming green fields into a “gigantic charnel house”. What began as a livestock disease quickly became a national trauma, exposing how fragile and tightly bound our…
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From Parish Wall to Prime Minister
Despite the slush and the grey skies, snow lends even the most familiar ground a quiet grandeur. Roseberry Topping, half veiled in white, looks less like a hill and more like a stage set, its lines sharpened and its history briefly made visible. This wall climbing its eastern flank marks the old parish boundary between…
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Access Without Respect
A pack of a dozen mountain bikers bursts down the newly rebuilt, stone-stepped path on Roseberry Topping. Several are motor-assisted. Gravity does the rest. Gravel skitters, walkers flinch, gates are left yawning behind them. For a few loud seconds the hill is theirs, claimed by speed and noise. It looks impressive, in the way a…
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Letting Sheep Be Sheep
I cannot quite tell whether these sheep huddling under the gorse to dodge the sleet are tough old “moor” sheep or soft “lowland” types, but either way they carry the usual reputation. Sheep, like cows, belch methane, methane warms the planet, and that is that. Or so we thought. A study with the esoteric name…
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Initials in Stone, Mist in Motion
I stood on the summit of Roseberry Topping this morning, watching the mist drift over the fields below like a slow tide. The place felt as old as the hills, quiet enough to hear your own thoughts. Looking down at graffiti cut into the rock centuries ago only sharpened that feeling. I am guessing, of…