Tag: history
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Shitlington: A Cross, a Fair, and Eight Centuries of Unfortunate Spelling
In the Peak District sits a hill called Shatton Moor. My Duke of Edinburgh groups used to home in on it every time, like pigeons to a statue, and the jokes wrote themselves. The name is almost certainly Old English. “Scēat-tūn” — a corner of land plus a farmstead. “The farm on the edge.” Dull,…
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A Glimpse of the Frontier: Black Middens Bastle House
In the 16th century, the “Debatable Land” sitting between England and Scotland had no time for national loyalty. Survival was a subscription service, and missing a payment was bad for your health. We now think of “blackmail” as something that happens to politicians on laptops. It was, in fact, invented here, as a perfectly formal…
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Iburndale: The Industrial Revolution Missed Its Stop
I must admit I can’t recall ever passing through Iburndale — certainly not on a bike, and that hill is steep. Sleights many times of course, but Iburndale feels such a contiguous part of Sleights, containing that same 20th-century housing favoured by retirees and the commuters of Whitby. The old village, once clustered around the…
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Barnaby Toll Road: Even the Dead Paid to Pass
A gravel track on a baking summer day runs through lush green verges high with cow parsley and nettles. To the left stands Toll Cottage, an 18th-century stone building with a terracotta pantile roof and a weather vane on its gable. Before tarmac, before bypasses, before anyone thought roads should be free, there was Barnard’s…
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The Field That Keeps Its Secret
This never fails to make me smile. That teardrop island and the stubby little peninsula — where the farmer at Aireyholme cuts around rather than through — mark where the ground has quietly given up. They sit at the outer edge of the old Roseberry Mine ironstone workings. The miners used what they called “bord…
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Georgie Porgie, Pudding and Pie
A quiet family walk round Duncombe Park, or so we hoped. We picked the one weekend a mega motorcycle festival decided to roar through, and so much for peace and birdsong. I wonder what Helmsley Castle made of the scene. Perched on a rocky outcrop above the River Rye, its shattered east tower looming over…
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Drawing the Blood String: An 18th-Century Ritual
I had to negotiate this suckler herd grazing quietly under Easby Moor today. That stare. Intense, almost hostile. Yet these were docile animals, and generally always have been — which is precisely why farmers could do things to them that would make a surgeon wince. Yorkshire has a particular buried history here. “Drawing” the “nature…
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Ticksey How
The Smeathorns Road across the moor to Castleton. I have ridden it more times than I can count, and today I nearly missed it again. A boundary stone. Right there, behind the stock fence. Weathered sandstone, inscribed “S Ticksey how” — marking the old boundary between the parishes of Stanghow and Moorsholm. The wire mesh…
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From Riot to Rainbow Bunting
Killing time before the Aberdeen ferry, we turned a corner in Lerwick and walked straight into their Pride March. Shetland, June 2026. Granite streets, rainbow bunting, children playing snare drums under a rain-filled sky. A reminder that this all started somewhere very different. The first Pride was not a parade. It was a brawl. On…
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Ayre of Billigroot: The Law That Scotland Cannot Kill
I bought a 1956 guidebook off eBay. It was a good decision. It mentioned a beach at Stavaness with “almost spherical granite boulders.” That was enough. The likely candidate was the Ayre of Billigroot, though calling it an ayre is generous. The word comes from the Old Norse “eyrr,” meaning a gravel beach. The Vikings…