• Teeth of the Lion: Nature’s Yellow Peril

    Teeth of the Lion: Nature’s Yellow Peril

    Raisdale is not known for its dandelions—Teeth of the Lion. But this is a splendid crop. Beloved by children for their time-telling attribute and wish-granting parachute seeds, as if horology and magic come naturally to plants. Its garish yellow flowers chase the sun like sycophants and offer pollinators an early-season breakfast. Every part of it…

  • When War Came to Teesside: The Night the Zeppelins Roared

    When War Came to Teesside: The Night the Zeppelins Roared

    On the night of 2nd May 1916, the New Moon cast an eerie darkness over the coastal towns and villages of the Yorkshire Coast. As the tranquil evening unfolded, an unsettling noise gradually erupted from the sky, until it echoed like the roar of an express train. Moments later, a series of random explosions were…

  • The Postgate School

    The Postgate School

    Here’s one I’ve been saving up, not for a rainy day, for today has been anything but rainy, positively sweltering, but a day when being Out & About has been a touch limited. It is a photo of the hallowed “village schoolroom museum” of Great Ayton, proudly preserving the educational shrine where James Cook—local boy…

  • Yorkshire’s Pride: The Enduring Allure of Roseberry Topping

    Yorkshire’s Pride: The Enduring Allure of Roseberry Topping

    It has been some time since I inflicted a post about Roseberry Topping upon the world, the conical-shaped hill that looms over this northeastern corner of what is the historical county of Yorkshire, albeit a recycling of previous posts. Local pride being what it is, they have long called it “t’ highest hill i’ all…

  • A Boundary Stone of 1860 and a Chaloner Legacy

    A Boundary Stone of 1860 and a Chaloner Legacy

    A one-way walk to Guisborough—infinitely preferable than a circular route. Today’s image features Highcliff Nab, seen from just below Black Nab across the fields of Codhill Farm—or Highcliffe Farm, depending on whom you wish to offend. One must name both or risk mild social unrest. The boundary stone, engraved “T.C. G 1860,” of course refers…

  • Green Bank: Where the Ice Met its Match

    Green Bank: Where the Ice Met its Match

    Yesterday’s post about Hagg’s Gate set me off thinking, descending yet another rabbit hole: about the time the last glacier flowed down the Vale of York and slammed into the Cleveland Hills. About the time that ice sheet politely stopped at the hills’ feet. About the time these great north and west escarpments of the…

  • Hagg’s Gate, Clay Bank or Whatever it’s Called This Week

    Hagg’s Gate, Clay Bank or Whatever it’s Called This Week

    Another photograph from yesterday. I am standing on White Hill, the easternmost bump of the so-called Four Sisters of the Cleveland Hills and gazing across the col at Hagg’s Gate, or at least what used to be called Hagg’s Gate, towards Carr Ridge and the highest point of the North York Moors on Urra Moor.…

  • Jack’s Short Life: From Rural Bilsdale to the Trenches of the Great War

    Jack’s Short Life: From Rural Bilsdale to the Trenches of the Great War

    A view from Cold Moor to Garfit Gap. The row of sheds belong to the industrial pheasant rearing farm at Whingroves, a shining example of rural diversification, if one defines success as raising battery-bred birds for folk to shoot. In 1896, however, it was just another typical mixed farm on the North York Moors, run…

  • A Dog’s Grim Discovery: A Moorsholm Murder

    A Dog’s Grim Discovery: A Moorsholm Murder

    It began, as many grim tales do, with a dog. One cold March morning in 1857, Joseph Green, a farmer in the quiet village of Moorsholm—tucked between Guisborough and Whitby—was startled when his dog returned home with a gruesome prize clamped in its jaws: the leg and foot of a child. The horror of the…

  • Mother Shimble’s Snick-needles

    Mother Shimble’s Snick-needles

    The famous Bluebells of Newton and Cliff Rigg Woods are having a lie-in. Give them a week, perhaps, before they are at their best. Meanwhile, the true prima donna of the woodland floor is the Greater Stitchwort, cluttering the place with its endless sprinkling of white, star-shaped flowers that seem to think themselves terribly precious.…

Care to comment?