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Thwaite’s Gift to the Natural World: The Lives of the Kearton Brothers
A typical Swaledale landscape: stone-built cottages in Thwaite and those endlessly fascinating dry-stone walls dissecting the surrounding fields. Many of the walls date from the 18th century, but, alas, there is the obligatory parked car ruining the scene. Otherwise, one imagines this view would be instantly familiar to Thwaite’s greatest sons, Richard and Cherry Kearton.…
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Highcliff Nab and Autumn’s Troubling Showstopper
The woodlands are ablaze with reds, oranges, and yellows in what I might call a “dazzling display,” if I were given to such enthusiasms. Recent rain has kept the trees hydrated, and unseasonably warm weather has delayed their annual shedding. How quaint. I am on my way to Guisborough, following the forest track through Hutton…
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The Leaning Larch of Roseberry Common
A tree of little grandeur—stunted, battered, and twisted by all that the North York Moors can throw at it—leans, barely upright, on Roseberry Common, straining its gnarled branches towards Easby Moor, where the monument to Capt. James Cook RN stands. This, let us say, “larch” — and I am sure some arborist will leap to…
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Jackson’s Bank—Medieval Trod
As you reach the top of Jackson’s Bank, it is hard not to imagine that, at the turn of the last century, weary walkers resting upon these boulders were serenaded by the rather pastoral sounds of iron-laden trucks grinding, screeching, and clattering their way down that incline on the opposite side of Greenhow Botton. This…
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Westworth Reservoir: Gorse and Other Triumphs of Nature
In my Guisborough days, I would often run a circuit round Westworth Reservoir. This morning, in a fit of nostalgia, I returned to that old stomping ground. How changed it is. The former reservoir bed has given way to a jungle of gorse, now sprawling with abandon, save for a dank, overgrown marsh clinging feebly…
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Roseberry Common and the “Tragedy” of Our Shared Resources
“Roseberry Common” — the name, so familiar, may scarcely remind us that this is indeed Common land, open for grazing, fuel, and other resources by the Commoners. Though now under the care of the National Trust, Commoners with lingering rights to this land persist like relics, a living exhibit the Trust must tread carefully around,…
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Robin Hood’s Bed: Erosion, Myths, and Grouse Shooters’ Wine
Our return journey across the M62 was, unsurprisingly, rather more foggy than the outward. This, coupled with a smidgen of common sense, deterred any whim to revisit Blackstone Edge. Thus, I here is instead another photograph from yesterday’s wander, of the rock formation bearing the pretentious title of “Robin Hood’s Bed” or, to vary the…
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The Aiggin Stone: a Resilient Guidepost of Blackstone Edge
On a damp, somewhat joyless morning, we embarked on a foray up Blackstone Edge, detouring briefly from the misery of the M62 to scale this Pennine hill. Past the summit trig. point and “Robin Hood’s Bed”—an erratic boulder unceremoniously perched there as though in mockery—we came upon the Aiggin Stone, a relic with pretensions of…
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Crime, Concealment, and Moral Panic in Newton-under-Roseberry
On the 6th of November, 1847, the Yorkshire Gazette regaled its readers with a dark tale from the village of Newton-under-Roseberry. “Concealment of Child Birth. — On Saturday last, the body of a newly born female child was found in a privy, in the village of Newton-under-Roseberry, by a person named Jackson, who nailed fast…
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The Battle of Brambles: Managing Little Dale’s Wild Side
The gorse, in its garish yellow splendour, provides the only relief to Little Dale’s dreary winter vista—a scene as lively as a crypt. One marvels that the National Trust, using funds from the estimable Enterprise Neptune scheme, thought it prudent to acquire this rather unremarkable hollow near Saltburn-by-the-Sea from Brough House Farm in 1997. The…
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