Tag: history
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The Postgate School
Hereâs one Iâve 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 âvillage schoolroom museumâ of Great Ayton, proudly preserving the educational shrine where James Cookâlocal boy…
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A Boundary Stone of 1860 and a Chaloner Legacy
A one-way walk to Guisboroughâinfinitely preferable than a circular route. Todayâs image features Highcliff Nab, seen from just below Black Nab across the fields of Codhill Farmâor Highcliffe Farm, depending on whom you wish to offend. One must name both or risk mild social unrest. The boundary stone, engraved âT.C. G 1860,â of course refers…
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Green Bank: Where the Ice Met its Match
Yesterdayâs post about Haggâs 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 hillsâ feet. About the time these great north and west escarpments of the…
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Haggâs Gate, Clay Bank or Whatever itâs 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 Haggâs Gate, or at least what used to be called Haggâs Gate, towards Carr Ridge and the highest point of the North York Moors on Urra Moor.…
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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…
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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 Moorsholmâtucked between Guisborough and Whitbyâwas 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…
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Hunt Cliff â Victorian Engineering Meets Geological Indifference
It is endlessly surprisingâthough it really should not beâhow absurdly fragile this stretch of the old Cleveland Railway remains, teetering along the edge of Hunt Cliff as though daring gravity to intervene. Originally built between 1865 and 1867, its grand purpose was to move ironstone from Loftus to the blast furnaces east of Middlesbrough. Rather…
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Tripsdale: Following Sheep into the Abyss
âWhat shall we do tomorrow?â asked my wife, as if I had a list of thrilling options tucked up my sleeve. I suggested Tripsdale and the Ship Stoneâalso known, with thrilling regional charm, as âTâ Ship Steean.â I then asked if she had ever visited the Low Cable Stones. She had not. Not unsurprising. Getting…
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On this Day in 1936, the Iconic Trig Pillar was Born
On 18 April 1936, a small band of surveyors gathered around a concrete pillar in a field in Cold Ashby, Northamptonshire, to begin the retriangulation of Great Britain. The previous effort, from the early 1800s, had apparently become too out-dated to be useful. Thus began the era of the trig pillar: those four-foot concrete obelisks…
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A Bransdale Stang Stoop That Time has Forgot
Up on Gimmer Bank in Bransdale today, just above Bloworth Slack before it merges with Badger Gill to become Hodge Beck, I noticed this old piece of farming history: a âstang stoopâ, or âheaveâ, or âslip gateââback from when labour was cheap and farmers made do with local resources instead of buying five-bar gates from…