Tag: history
-
Echoes from the Old Workings beneath Cliff Rigg
In 1894 the Northern Echo carried a grim report of a inquest into a fatality in a whinstone quarry near Nettle Hole, a place that sits a good fifty metres below any workings that make sense on a modern map. My first thought was that the incident must point towards a tunnel beneath Aireyholme Lane,…
-
Little Roseberry and an Echo of Old Norse
From this viewpoint on Ryston Bank the knoll of Little Roseberry takes on a presence rather more commanding than its shy appearance on the O.S. Map, where it is denied even a ring contour. If the name Roseberry grew out of “Othenesberg”, the Old Norse for Odin’s Hill, it seems a touch peculiar that its…
-
Gallow How: Where Danby Meets Westerdale
On Thursday the first of August 1907, Danby staged its customary ‘Riding the Boundary’, a grand ritual meant to affirm the limits of the Manor, and by extension the Parish, while also paying annual homage to the Lord of the Manor, Hugh Richard, Viscount Downe. The bailiff opened the day with a ringing “Oyez, Oyez,…
-
Snow on the Ruins of Cote Garth
The ruined farms hidden beneath the forestry east of Cod Beck Reservoir sit like half-forgotten whispers of a tougher age. Among them, Cote Garth stands out, its broken walls sharp against the last scraps of the recent snowfall, as though the land itself is determined to remind us that someone once fought wind, rain and…
-
Winter Transforms the Village
Fresh snow arrived over night and dressed the village with the sort of delicate filigree that flatters every scene. Even the drabbest view has been turned into something fit for a gallery. This is Station Road, usually choked with parked cars, this morning quiet and softened so completely that the few vehicles present appear to…
-
Coate Moor, Larches
A view from the top of Coate Moor towards the head of Kildale, an obsequent valley biting back into the Cleveland escarpment. The glacial upheaval forced the River Leven to scour a narrow gorge through the shales and sandstones below Coate Moor. I have posted about this before. But Kildale has another, somewhat obscure, point…
-
The Lost Path of Jackdaw Crag
Just along the coast from where the Cleveland Way passes by the mineral railway, far too close to the shear drop for comfort, past the Charm Bracelet sculpture the cliff becomes deceptively less steep. Here walkers might breath a sigh of relief. Yet somewhere below, hidden from view, lies Jackdaw Crag, no doubt once favoured…
-
The Bottom End of Castleton, Where a Door Closed…
I had been leafing through Joseph Ford’s “Some Reminiscences and Folk Lore of Danby Parish and District”, when one small passage stopped me in my tracks. Ford described the steady trickle of those who slipped away from the Esk Valley in the nineteenth century, chasing whispers of a new life across the ocean. Among them…
-
High Hazel Heads
Hidden deep in a dark conifer plantation, where Goldcrests tweet high among the needles — or so I was told, an old man’s hearing failing to pick up the high frequencies — lies the forgotten farmstead of High Hazel Heads. Few come here now, and fewer still would guess that beneath these trees once lay…
-
Echoes over the Rye: The Now and Then of Hawnby
Perched high above the River Rye, on a lonely spur between moorland becks, stands the village of Hawnby. On a damp November morning, its muted greens melt into the hills around it. With houses dressed in matching tones, it has the look of an estate village—an echo of a time when the landlord demanded order,…