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The House That Roads Built
Standing on Cliff Rigg on an overcast May morning, the view is, not to put too fine a point on it, rather spectacular. The valley of the River Leven spreads below, patchwork fields rolling away to the Cleveland Hills, and a small cluster of houses sits quietly along Dikes Lane. One of them stops you…
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Elm Houses: A Story of Two Bransdale Farms
Tucked into a remote part of Bransdale, Elm Houses has a history worth telling. What is today one tidy holiday cottage surrounded by idle farm buildings was once two entirely separate farms: High and Low Elm House. On the right stands High Elm House, a long 18th-century range. A lintel stone dated 1780 records its…
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Echoes in the Vale: The Ghostly Rise and Fall of Leven Vale Cottages
By the mid-1850s, “Ironstone Fever” had Cleveland in its grip. The success at Eston tempted the Trustees of the young Robert Bell Turton to open up the Kildale Estate through an 1855 Act of Parliament. Investors fell for the “rabbit hole theory” — the tall story that John Marley had stumbled upon Eston’s underground riches…
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A New View, a New Muddle
The recent clear felling of a block of forestry in Ayton Banks Wood has opened up a new view of Roseberry. The commercial timber has gone, leaving a few gangly birch trees to stand guard over the valley. It turns out that Gribdale Terrace, that isolated row of white cottages, has a history which is…
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Crathorne Hall
Look at this fine house, which Pevsner described as “large and lavish”. Lording it over the Leven valley. It was built between 1903 and 1906 for a man named James Lionel Dugdale; Lord Dugdale to give him his title. Today, this building is an upmarket hotel. You will pay a lot of money to sleep…
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A Murder at Kildale, 1871
The view from the hills above Kildale, taken yesterday — when the weather was rather more agreeable than today’s thoroughly dreich conditions. The North York Moors is not the sort of place one associates with violent crime. Yet on the evening of Wednesday 16 August 1871, a quiet farm in Kildale became the scene of…
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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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Bonfield Ghyll
Humanity is not a guest of nature. It is a meddling tenant. In the 1980s, university researchers came to some remarkable conclusions using peat cores taken from the high reaches of Bonfield Gill. Using radiocarbon dating, they found that those Mesolithic folk were not living in harmony with the woods. They were playing with fire. These…
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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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The Railway That Never Was: Helmsley to Thirsk, 1856
Look at this photograph of Gowerdale. Green, serene, and — rather importantly — entirely free of Victorian ironwork. It came within a whisker of being otherwise. By 1856, Britain’s great Railway Mania was already ancient history — or at least a decade-old hangover. The mid-1840s had seen 263 Acts of Parliament passed in a single…
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