Tag: National Trust
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Bridle Gill Road
Follow this sunken holloway downhill to Newton-under-Roseberry and the terrain gives a hint of its age. Gorse and scrubby trees crowd the banks. Between them the track lies deep, worn down by centuries of boots, hooves and heavy loads. Nobody wears down a trench like that by a Sunday stroll up Roseberry. Today it is…
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Waiting on the Autumn Rains
One coastal stretch of National Trust land lies on the cliffs north of Runswick Bay, and below it, tangled up in bramble and blackthorn, lie the bones of a Victorian ironworks. The Victoria Ironstone Company had no road in, only the sea, and in 1856 they built a mine, a works and a harbour anyway.…
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White Dust, Tropical Lust: The Oak Mildew Invader
Back on my own patch after two weeks away, and the oaks in Newton Wood have gone a ghostly white, as though someone had taken a flour sifter to the whole wood. Powdery mildew turned up in Europe in 1907 and has been putting a dampener on the British summer ever since. The parasite began…
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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…