Cleveland: A County No One Wanted

All Fools’ Day 1974—the perfect occasion for bureaucratic tomfoolery. On this particular day, the North Riding of Yorkshire relinquished half of Roseberry Topping to the nascent “County of Cleveland.” A curious choice of name, given that “Cleveland” means “hilly land” in Old English, whereas this new county was largely flat. Nonetheless, the boundary was drawn, over Roseberry Topping, down the Common, following this wall up to Newton Moor. Most of the actual Cleveland Hills, mercifully, remained in North Yorkshire.

For centuries, northern England was divided into wapentakes, a name coming from an ancient method of voting, which involved brandishing weapons—an approach that, one suspects, might still have its merits. These divisions contained parishes, each designed to be self-sufficient with access to varied terrain. Consequently, the flanks of Roseberry Topping were shared by the parishes of Ayton and Newton, their boundary running right over the summit.

For as long as both parishes belonged to the North Riding, such distinctions were of little concern. That changed in the latter half of the twentieth century, when governments decided that ancient boundaries were inefficient. This was the era when bigger was thought to mean better. A 1969 Commission proposed reorganising local government into larger units, one of which was to be based on the newly formed Teesside. Sixteen rural parishes—including Great Ayton with its share of Roseberry Topping—were to be absorbed into a new urban conglomerate.

A change of government in 1970 put a halt to these grand plans, and scrapped most of the Commission’s recommendations but let a few slip through, including the expansion of Teesside. Naturally, the community of Great Ayton was not thrilled. Its objections were based on local identity, politics, and the simple fact that they had more in common with Stokesley than with Middlesbrough’s industrial sprawl. Resistance swiftly took the form of a “Help Keep Ayton in Yorkshire” campaign. Against the odds, it worked. In January 1972, it was declared that Great Ayton would remain in Yorkshire. Church bells rang in celebration, while Teesside lamented the loss of its grand vision of unity. As a result, the county boundary was drawn along the parish line between Newton and Ayton, neatly bisecting Roseberry Topping.

But if the bureaucrats of 1969 had favoured centralisation over local sentiment, by the 1990s the tide had turned. The latest reorganisation focused on local identity, and—unsurprisingly—found that few people felt any allegiance to Cleveland, which was abolished in 1996, replaced by four smaller authorities. The northern half of Roseberry Topping found itself in Redcar and Cleveland, where it remains.

Of course, given that the hill belongs to the National Trust and sits within the North York Moors National Park, these administrative shuffles have made little real difference. Unless, of course, one recalls the lockdown era, when the rules were so finely crafted that one could ascend Roseberry Topping for daily exercise but was forbidden to cross the county boundary on the way down. Bureaucracy, as ever, at its finest.