Tag: National Trust
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Gravity Strikes Again
Word on the street was that a subsidence hole had opened up near the summit of Roseberry Topping. Naturally, I decided to go and have a look. On the face of it, it was not especially dramatic. No great chasm had opened beneath the summit and swallowed half of Cleveland. Still, the hole was deep…
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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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Butterflies, Thistledown and the Long Arm of the Law
Memory plays odd tricks. Yesterday mine dredged up a scene from some Disney film, the heroine wandering through a meadow with butterflies and birds fluttering about her like a doting entourage. Animators loved surrounding young women with woodland creatures. Saved them writing dialogue. This field needed video, really, to do it justice. Thistles stretched as…
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Saltburn Sands From North Bank
North Bank is the steep cliff behind the Ship Inn at Old Saltburn, and not many know the National Trust owns it. I went there today for a bioblitz. That is jargon for an intensive, time-limited hunt to record every living thing on a patch of land, in this case bumblebees, butterflies, wildflowers, whatever moved…
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Grand Designs on the Yorkshire Coast
The National Park has put in new wooden steps down to Port Mulgrave, and for once a public body has done something rather useful. The path gets you most of the way from the cliff top to the scatter of huts below, clustered round what is left of the harbour. Walk it and you get…
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Georgian Grandeur and Stray Underpants
A day at Ormesby Hall. Georgian grandeur, 240 acres of parkland, the whole pastoral dream — except it sits cheek by jowl with Middlesbrough’s suburbs, and the public has made its feelings known. We were there to pick litter. The woodland strip along Ladgate Lane told the usual story. Packaging. Broken hardware. Poo bags. Sanitary…
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A Morning on Newton Moor
Word had reached me that this nineteenth-century boundary stone, marking the old parish line between Hutton Lowcross and Newton, had fallen over. It has not been broken, nor properly buried — just balanced upright and packed around with a few small stones. Frankly, it is rather remarkable that it stood for over 200 years. Or…
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Valley Garden: Bluebells, Bog Plants and a Baffling Fern
In the early 1950s, Lord Feversham had a rather splendid idea. To keep his staff at Bransdale Lodge busy, he ordered a “wild garden” to be carved out of Gimmer Bank Wood, on the soggy banks of Blowith Slack, a tributary of Hodge Beck. In went azaleas, rhododendrons, flowering cherries and a good deal more…
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Standing on Nature for a Better Angle
The path in this photograph of the bluebells in the National Trust’s Newton Wood is a monument to the perfect social media post. We love nature so much that we are treading it into the ground. It is so disheartening. Bluebells are sensitive souls. Their leaves are soft and succulent. They are generally intolerant of…
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Ramsons—The Plant That Smells Like Trouble and Tastes Like Dinner
You will smell ‘em before you see ‘em. A whole wood reeking of garlic — this is wild garlic, or Ramsons, doing its thing for a couple of months each spring. The Old English word “brmsa” gave its name to places still on the map today: Ramsbottom, Ramsey, Ramsdell, Ramshorn. In AD 944, a royal…