Category: Urra Moor
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Inheritance and Oblivion on Urra Moor
On the bleak expanse of Urra Moor, a lone boundary stone stands sentinel over the heather. Winter has tried to lay its white shroud over the name FOULIS, once lord of the manor at Ingleby, but hasn’t quite succeded. It reads like a quiet obituary in stone, the record of a family slipping out of…
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Billy’s Dyke on the High Moor
Just after the midwinter feast of 1070, William the Conqueror, fresh from Christmas in York, marched north to settle a score. His garrison at Durham had been slaughtered, and he meant to answer blood with fire. What followed was ruin on a grand scale. Villages, farms, whole stretches of countryside were wiped clean, with no…
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Who Was Mitchell Atkinson?
Most of you know I am no admirer of memorials. Benches, plaques and carved rocks scatter the moors like litter. Yet this one is somewhat different, as if justified by age. Hidden off the main paths above Greenhow Botton since 1972, I had no idea it existed until I came across it, a few years…
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The Witch-Mare of Orra—A Forgotten Nightmare Myth
Ah, Urra—barely discernible through the oppressive cloud that choked my aimless trudge around the moor it so generously lends its name to. It is also the setting for the utterly enthralling tale of the Witch-Mare of Orra. A legend I have alluded to with tiresome frequency, though clearly without bothering to grasp its finer points.…
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The Hag-Mare’s No-Show: A Snowbound Trudge Across Urra Moor
A circuit of Urra Moor—Orrah, as it was once called before the Ordnance Survey decided to tidy up. The moor was generously blanketed in snow, looking superb The witch that supposedly roams this moor as a horse—the illustrious “hag-mare of Orrah”—was nowhere to be seen. A shame, really; she would have made an interesting subject…
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A Stone in the Heather
While the heather is in full bloom, it seems absurd not to be up on the moors. This boundary stone, standing proud over the heather, is marked on its Bilsdale side with the inscription “FEVERSHAM 1848,” a name requiring little introduction. It refers, of course, to William Duncombe, the 2nd Baron Feversham, whose seat was…
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Brock or Huckster? What’s behind the name of the Badger Stone?
I succeeded in reaching the Badger Stone before the snow came. By the time I returned to the car, I had transformed into a snowman. The Badger Stone, an oddity in itself, is a sturdy sandstone outcrop standing alone and distant on the periphery of a plateau within a desolate moorland, rising to a height…
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A moment in time — frozen ponds, Cleveland Way, and an impending transformation
I took this photograph with an eye toward history. It’s a scene on the brink of transformation. A couple of frozen ponds glisten at the low point between Round Hill and Badger Gill on Urra Moor. They drain southward into Hodge Beck—Bransdale. The Cleveland Way stands out as it crests the hill, slightly to the…
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Cheese, Stones, and a Summer Solstice Alignment
I’ve been diving back into that book, “Rock Art and Ritual,” the one I got off eBay a few weeks back. It’s been giving me the itch to go revisit some of the out of the way nooks and crannies on the North York Moors. So today, I took a little jaunt around Urra Moor,…
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Nanny Newgill, the Broughton Witch — Part II
Back on the Cleveland Hills after a few days break. I was reminded crossing Urra Moor that I need to post the second part of Richard Blakeborough’s 1902 tale of Nanny Newgill, the Broughton Witch. For Part I see here. NANNY NEWGILL, THE BROUGHTON WITCH. SYNOPSIS OF PART I. Dinah Curry, a Broughton girl, marries…