Category: Scugdale
-
Scugdale – home of the Yorkshire Giant
Today is the birthday of one-time newspaper editor, politician, purveyor of celebrated hoaxes, promotor of a blend of fake and real, who is widely credited with coining the adage “There’s a sucker born every minute”. His dubious business practices crossed the border into the unscrupulous, and his name lives on in film and legend. He…
-
Furthering the Right to Roam
Today is the anniversary of the Mass Trespass of 1932, when four to five hundred ramblers climbed Kinder Scout in the Peak District in defiance of the restrictions on access at the time. Their aim was to establish a public right of access onto the moors that were privately owned for grouse shooting. The movement…
-
At the west end of Scot Crags
Well, it’s Scot Crags according to the first mappers of the Ordnance Survey. Probably better known as Barker’s Crags nowadays. I am looking down on the spur they mapped as Rakes Intake where Snotterdale merges with Scugdale. Scugdale is both an unusual valley and one of contrasts. It is one of the few east-west lying…
-
The Ash
Near Huthwaite Green in Scugdale a fine specimen of the Common or European Ash, Fraxinus excelsior, one of Britain’s most majestic trees. In Norse mythology, the tree is Yggdrasil, a great ash at the centre of the cosmos where its branches and roots connect different places and time, allowing passage from the underworld to heaven.…
-
Rank Crag
Exploring the head of Scugdale. A distinct line of crags and broken ground at around the 310m contour, the same height as the nick on Stoney Ridge above Holy Well Gill on the southern edge of Scugdale. A coincidence? Maybe not. Between 26,000 and 10,000 years ago during the last ice age, a great glacier…
-
“By, yon’s a sooth-east, piner, aa’reet!”
To be honest the weather today hasn’t been the most conducive for the taking of photographs. A raw, bitter wind which does not take the trouble to go around you, but pierces right through to your very bones. No matter my layers of Polartec, gloves and a hat of the finest merino wool. ‘A lazy…
-
Clain Wood
You don’t see that many hangers of beech in North Yorkshire, its soils are too clayey. They don’t like getting their feet wet preferring dry alkaline soils like the chalk hills of Southern England. In the north, beech is considered a non-native species. The Cleveland Way and Coast to Coast footpaths go through this little…
-
Stony Wicks Boundary Stone
A morning run up Scugdale and over to the Lords Stones, where I was to meet my wife. “Did you see the rainbow?”, she asked. Wanting to avoid pedantry I replied I had but I could have said: “no, but I saw a rainbow”. I took a photo of it and this is it. It…
-
A moorjock on Barker’s Ridge
Grazing below Stony Wicks, a scrappy sandstone set of crags at the head of Scugdale, this moorland sheep is oblivious to the eerie sight of the morning fog creeping up the dale from the Vale of Cleveland. Colloquially known as Moorjocks, this sheep is probably a Swaledale, said to be one of the mountain breeds…
-
Huthwaite Green
Also known as Heathwaite, names which are as Yorkshire as a name can be, the ‘thwaite’ element coming from the Old Scandinavian word for a clearing: thveit. Heathwaite means a high clearing and Huthwaite a hill clearing. This view over the buttercup meadows of Scugdale is a familiar sight for walkers on the Cleveland Way,…