Tag: history
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Penny Nab at Low Tide: A Hunt for a Lost Tramway
One from Sunday, when the tide finally allowed a proper wander along the scar below Penny Nab at Staithes, hunting for traces of a narrow gauge tramway that once skirted the base of the cliff at Jet Wyke, heading towards Old Nab. Whatever survives has spent two hundred years being battered twice daily by the…
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When the Sea Brought Fashion to Staithes
Storms wash up all sorts along this stretch of coast. Driftwood. Old rope. The odd sad welly. Coal—see my previous post. In October 1992 they washed up a different windfall. A forty foot shipping container broke loose from its vessel during a gale and settled below these cliffs at Hole Wyke, three miles from Staithes.…
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The Symbolic Shield: Decoding the 800-Metre Wall of Scarth Wood Moor
Scarth Wood Moor looks like empty, timeless terrain, but under the heather sits what used to be a busy Bronze Age settlement. This worn line of boulders belongs to an orthostatic wall, which is a fancy way of saying a prehistoric boundary made from big standing stones placed at even gaps. Frank Elgee first noted…
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Haggesgate
Walking down from Carr Ridge towards the col at Clay Bank never fails to set me wondering. Is this deep gash in the hillside natural, or did centuries of boots and hooves carve it out, a proper holloway worn into the moor? Go off-piste and you will come across other gullies running alongside it, plainly…
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Slingsby — A Street Village
Retirement was meant to cure the Monday morning blues. It has not. That grim feeling still turns up right on schedule, uninvited and entirely unbothered by my pension. So the mind wanders back to the weekend, when we cycled south into the Howardian Hills, fifteen miles of Corallian limestone squeezed between the Vale of York…
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The Sponsored Swim That Ended an Era
Standing below these rusted iron stanchions, I cannot help reflecting on how coincidentally a name can turn up twice in as many weeks. Kathleen Elizabeth Mary Cooper Abbs, the last person to live in the Arts and Crafts house built among the ruins of Mount Grace Priory. She was nobody’s idea of a quiet tenant.…
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The Mock Medievalism of Carrmire Gate
Carrmire Gate is enormous, and this is merely the East Turret, which tells you everything about scale at Castle Howard and nothing about sense. Nicholas Hawksmoor designed this limestone monster in 1725 as the very first thing a visitor sees on the approach to the house. It was the last part of the whole entrance…
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A Crow’s Foot on a Gatepost
The gate itself is nothing to write home about. Seven metal bars, a stone post, the sort of thing you would walk past without a second glance. The gatepost once had a partner, another “stoup” standing guard on the other side, but that would have got hauled out years ago so tractors could squeeze through.…
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The Spirit of the Past: When a Carthusian Ruin Became a 1,500-Person Stage
In 1927, the quiet ruins of Mount Grace Priory got a shock. For three days they were dragged out of their peaceful retirement and dressed up in the “forgotten pomp and ceremony” of a proper Roaring Twenties do. Grief did it. Lady Florence Bell had lost two heirs in 1926, and the Historic Pageant of…
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Hood Grange
Behind this somewhat sad stone farmhouse lies eight centuries of quiet drama. A hermitage stood here before 1138, when monks moved in under Roger de Mowbray’s patronage. Cistercians took the place over, then shuffled off to Old Byland after five years, then on to Byland Abbey proper. Augustinian canons from nearby Newburgh Priory moved into…