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A Festive Hack or a Public Nuisance? My Meeting with the Hunt
Ah, the Boxing Day Hunt – that charming spectacle where tradition meets a total disregard for everyone else on the bridleway. How delightful to encounter the alpha redcoat, who generously allowed me some space before the rest of the merry field boxed me against the fence. Nose to tail they rode, oblivious to the fact…
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Tudor Christmas: Twelve Days of Saints and Swans
Up at an unholy hour to climb up Roseberry Topping and watch the sunrise. We were not alone. The place was packed, because apparently nothing says “Christmas spirit” like elbowing strangers on a hilltop. In Tudor times, you would not have found the masses up here. They would have been at Mass, fulfilling their religious…
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A Slog up Roseberry Topping and a Nod to Pagan Roots
I could claim it was a brisk dash up Roseberry Topping this morning, but in truth, it was more of a plodding trudge. Perhaps it only felt that way because I foolishly dressed for winter, not realising it would be unseasonably warm for Christmas Eve. This is the view from the summit, looking down on…
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Lealholm and the story of John Castillo, Poet and Stonemason
Lealholm developed around the first place you could sensibly cross the River Esk, just downstream of the dramatic gorge of Crunkly Ghyll. In the good old days, people splashed through a ford until someone finally built this graceful 17th-century bridge, which managed to survive the disastrous 1930 flood—unlike the bridges further downstream in Glaisdale, Egton,…
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Feeding Time at Clumber Park
Our annual family pilgrimage to the Dukeries of Nottinghamshire took place on a day so bitterly cold it felt as if the wind was personally attacking us. Two years since our last visit to Clumber Park, and it seems the National Trust has turned the festive season into a commercial extraganza. Extra off-road parking, a…
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A’ Thomasing: A Quaint Custom for St. Thomas Day
Yesterday was St. Thomas Eve, or so I gather from the indisputable evidence of my own post about it. Naturally, this means today, 21 December, must be St. Thomas Day—a grand occasion for destitute medieval widows, who marked the day by going “a’ Thomasing.” That is, begging for alms. In some places, it was called…
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A Dreary Day, a Doubtful Saint, and Too Much Christmas
A dreary, cold day, though mercifully not freezing, but with rain looming. St. Thomas’ Day Eve—dedicated to the patron saint of doubt—drapes itself in the sort of gloom that makes you wonder why you bothered to look out the window. That housing estate west of Guisborough in today’s photo? I had been blind to its…
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Roseberry In the Golden Hour
Roseberry was looking its usual self this morning as we trudged up Aireyholme Lane, the sun just beginning its obligatory climb over the Cleveland Hills. From this angle, Roseberry‘s distinctive shape is rather less obvious. High above, a waning gibbous moon lingered sulkily in the sky, and the early morning sunlight—in what us self-important photographers…
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Hummersea’s Lost Industry Beneath Jurassic Cliffs
On the Cleveland Way, below Hummersea Farm, a Public Footpath descends toward what was, as a Victorian postcard once called it, a “beach.” The path has been generously cleared of bracken and other wild vegetation, and a few strategically placed trail markers beckoned me downward. Naturally, I followed. But halfway down, at a shiny new…
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The Loftus Mine Rescue of 1935 and the Bravery of George Heslop
On this day, 17th December, in 1935, a roof collapse at Loftus Ironstone mine trapped two miners, John Cooper Henry and Henry Murrell, under a heap of rock. Enter George Heslop, the mine’s Agent and Manager, who arrived at 9 a.m. to find that the roof was still collapsing and other miners were understandably reluctant…
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