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Crosscliffe: The Prince, the Pellet, and the Pitch
The Crosscliffe Valley looks a quiet place. It was not so quiet on a Tuesday in 1915. A stray pellet from a grouse shoot hit the Jam Sahib of Nawanagar. He lost his right eye. This was a bit of a problem for a man who was reputed to be one of the greatest cricketers…
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Byland Abbey
Cars rattle through this narrow arch on the road from Oldstead, and hardly a driver spares it a glance. Yet this squeeze of stone is Byland Abbey‘s Inner Gatehouse, and in its day nobody passed through without good reason. Getting into the monastery was never a casual affair. The whole precinct sat behind a high wall,…
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The Inclosure Act 1845: The Making of the Working Class
On this day in 1845, Parliament handed over vast stretches of common land with barely a backward glance. The Inclosure Act set up a new breed of official, the enclosure commissioner, who no longer needed Parliament’s blessing for every land grab. One rubber stamp did the job from then on. The scale of it is…
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Kilburn’s White Horse
Everyone assumes the horse is ancient. Some pagan relic, carved by shadowy ancestors for reasons lost to the mists of time. Wrong, as it happens. The Kilburn horse was the work of one Thomas Taylor, a local boy who left for London, made his fortune, and came home with an idea instead of sense. He…
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Scarth Nick: Where Crowds Once Gathered
Scarth Nick sits in the Cleveland Hills like an open door open, and folk have been trudging through it since before anyone thought to write things down. Ancient wanderers used it. The Romans probably used it. By the Middle Ages it had become a drove road, with cattle plodding through where prehistoric feet once did.…
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Friga’s Little Valley: Still with its Ironstone
The North York Moors dales are broader than you expect, every single time. Stand on Danby Rigg and look down at Little Fryup Dale and you will see exactly what I mean: a proper patchwork quilt of a valley, laid out below like someone tipped a box of green and gold offcuts onto the hillside.…
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Penny Nab at Low Tide: A Hunt for a Lost Tramway
One from Sunday, when the tide finally allowed a proper wander along the scar below Penny Nab at Staithes, hunting for traces of a narrow gauge tramway that once skirted the base of the cliff at Jet Wyke, heading towards Old Nab. Whatever survives has spent two hundred years being battered twice daily by the…
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Unmanaged Blaze on Hutton Moor
Experts love a crisis. Last year, the tiny heather beetle was going to end the world as we know it. They claimed the infestation had turned the moors into a massive tinderbox of kindling—they may well have been right. But they also predicted a grey, withered future for the purple foliage. They were a bit…
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When the Sea Brought Fashion to Staithes
Storms wash up all sorts along this stretch of coast. Driftwood. Old rope. The odd sad welly. Coal—see my previous post. In October 1992 they washed up a different windfall. A forty foot shipping container broke loose from its vessel during a gale and settled below these cliffs at Hole Wyke, three miles from Staithes.…
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Yorkshire Day and a Flag That Behaves Itself
Here we are, then. The World Cup finished weeks ago, the face paint is long gone, yet flags are still tie-wrapped to lamp-posts and hung from windows like a rash that will not clear up. During the football, everyone let it slide. Bunting, jolly, harmless. The tournament is over now, though, and flags remain, and…
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