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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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The Swidden That Would Not Turn Purple
Here, on Great Ayton Moor, a swidden burnt a few seasons back to bring on fresh heather for the grouse. But judging by the tussocks, deer-grass had other plans. The plan was for heather — tender purple shoots laid on like a buffet for red grouse. What grew back was this: a spiky green swathe…
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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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Haggesgate
Walking down from Carr Ridge towards the col at Clay Bank never fails to set me wondering. Is this deep gash in the hillside natural, or did centuries of boots and hooves carve it out, a proper holloway worn into the moor? Go off-piste and you will come across other gullies running alongside it, plainly…
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The Great Heather Gamble
Europe is burning, and nobody has bothered telling the weather. Wildfires in Spain and France are breaking records while the Cairngorms also feels the heat. The North York Moors is not a stranger to this chaos. A massive blaze last year turned twenty-five square kilometres of one moor into a cinder. The Moorland Association has…
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