Tag: history
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Burtness Comb: A Watch Lost and a Frozen River
Burtness Comb hangs above Buttermere like a great green amphitheatre, tucked between High Stile and High Crag. I once picked my way down it during the Lake District Mountain Trial in 1978. Somewhere on that bracken-choked slope, there may still be an orange-faced Omega watch, a twenty-first birthday gift, quietly keeping time for no one.…
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The Slow Making of Buttermere and Crummock Water
That flat sweep of rich green pasture is not there by chance. It sits on the land bridge between Buttermere and Crummock Water, quietly doing the job of keeping the two lakes apart. It was built by a geological feature known as a fan-delta, courtesy of the steady graft of Mill Beck. Long before maps…
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Aitkin Knott and Keskadale
A sweeping, high-angle view drops into Keskadale, better known as the Newlands Valley, seen from the brown, heathered spine of Ard Crags. At the end of the ridge sits the small knoll of Aitken Knott. Here Earl Ackin, a leading Norse-Cumbrian lord and brother of Earl Boethar, was buried, set high above the land where…
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Billy’s Dyke on the High Moor
Just after the midwinter feast of 1070, William the Conqueror, fresh from Christmas in York, marched north to settle a score. His garrison at Durham had been slaughtered, and he meant to answer blood with fire. What followed was ruin on a grand scale. Villages, farms, whole stretches of countryside were wiped clean, with no…
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Roseberry Watching Over Enclosed Land
The nearest field in today’s photograph marks the site of the old farmstead of Summerhill, born out of Great Ayton’s enclosure of the common land in 1658. At that time, the commons stretched all the way to the top of Roseberry, open and shared in a way that would soon vanish. The enclosure was carried…
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Commondale and the Forgotten Potters of the Home Front
Commondale is a quiet village now, the sort that seems still half asleep by mid-morning. It was not always like this. The arrival of the railway changed everything. A brickworks followed, then a pottery, turning out objects of real quality. When pottery declined, production shifted again. Sanitary ware was made in volume, along with facing…
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The “T” Stones of Bilsdale West Moor
The North York Moors are littered with boundary stones, each one usually stamped with a dutiful little initial, the sort of thing an aristocratic landowner might choose when feeling terribly important. An “M” for Manners, an “F” for Feversham, a “CD” for Charles Duncombe. All very neat, all very tidy. Then you stumble upon a…
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The Scar on the Hill: Cliff Rigg Quarry
A dreich veil hung over North Yorkshire this morning, so I look back instead to yesterday, when the sky was clear, the air still, and the sun at least toyed with the idea of shining. Cliff Rigg Quarry looms above Great Ayton, a cavernous rent in the hillside left behind by an industry that has…
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Glaisdale’s Brief Age of Iron
Glaisdale began life as a quiet township within the parish of Danby, its name shifting through the centuries as Glasedale and Glacedale. Records from 1223 already linked it with the broad sweep of Glaisdale Moor, giving a sense of a place long settled into its landscape. For much of its history it has been a…
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Glaisdale and the Enigma of T. H.
Some two hundred yards up from the foot of the lane that strains its way up Caper Hill, a dry-stone wall is built around a large orthostat. Rough-hewn at the edges and smoothed across its face, it carries a message cut by hand in the late seventeenth century. Kneeling in the damp and wind, its…