Author: Fhithich

  • The Priory Gatehouse: Overshadowed but Not Forgotten

    The Priory Gatehouse: Overshadowed but Not Forgotten

    I had reason to visit Guisborough today and took the chance to walk around the old priory. I have posted before of its great east wall—impressive as it is, it remains only a fragment of what must once have been a formidable complex. The priory met its end in 1540 with the Dissolution. Ten years…

  • The Battle for the Barrows

    The Battle for the Barrows

    In a tide of encroaching bracken, a few exposed stones on a low rise suggest something hidden just beneath the heather. I am standing on a Round Barrow—one of four, perhaps five—in what was once a Bronze Age cemetery. These circular burial mounds, called barrows or cairns when built of stone, are the most common…

  • A Hidden Hollow-Way on Coleson Bank

    A Hidden Hollow-Way on Coleson Bank

    This morning’s constitutional threw up a surprise. I have used the so-called ‘Green Lane’ on Coleson Bank before, climbing out of Battersby, and even posted about it. You can just make out a glimpse of it in the photo. But I do not go that way often. The narrow gulley attracts off-road motorbikes, which makes…

  • Where the Sheep Went Swimming

    Where the Sheep Went Swimming

    Sheepwash, ever the draw for Teesside’s day-trippers, earned its name in the most literal way. It was once a place where sheep were hauled into the cold beck and scrubbed clean before shearing. Until the early twentieth century, many farmers still followed the old habit. The idea was to coax new wool to rise from…

  • A Lost Boundary Stone of Easby

    A Lost Boundary Stone of Easby

    Out on the moors, boundary stones are everywhere. In the Vale of Cleveland, though, they are relatively rare. I had driven past this one for nearly fifty years before noticing it properly. That only happened last year, when two men were working beside it. I assumed they were putting up a rustic farm sign and…

  • What Stripped the Trees? A Woodland Whodunnit

    What Stripped the Trees? A Woodland Whodunnit

    Not my usual kind of post, but here is a photo from Newton Wood showing two oak trees standing side by side. The one on the left looks as it should in mid-June: full canopy, dense green. The one on the right, though, is barely clothed—just a sparse fringe of leaves at the crown, the…

  • 1772: A Path, A Stone, A Hanging

    1772: A Path, A Stone, A Hanging

    The so-called “Miners’ Trod”, with Cold Moor rising beyond it, cuts a broad, unsightly scar along the hillside courtesy of the forestry workers. The path’s name comes from the nineteenth-century jet-miners, though it is unlikely they were its first users. That large boulder to the left bears the date “1772” and a scatter of initials,…

  • Foxgloves and Stone

    Foxgloves and Stone

    The bright purple foxgloves inject a sharp burst of summer colour into this view of Roseberry Topping, the conical shape of which remains instantly recognisable even from its backside. The rough dry-stone wall that cuts across the scene, adds texture and, for me, some interest. Yesterday I was out on the coast with the National…

  • The Black Gold of Far Jetticks

    The Black Gold of Far Jetticks

    A sheer cliff edge north of Robin Hood’s Bay gives a sweeping view of the Yorkshire Coast, where rock and industry meet. This coastline is now known more for its beauty than for what has been pulled from beneath it: ironstone, alum shale, jet, coal, sandstone, cementstone. Today, the prize is potash and polyhalite, mined…

  • DĂčn VĂčlan

    DĂčn VĂčlan

    This was an unexpected discovery on South Uist, though the Gothic lettering on the map did hint at something worth noting. Rubha Àird Mhuile is a low, sandy peninsula that juts into the Atlantic. Most of it is taken up by a shallow ‘inland’ loch. On the summit of a storm-thrown shingle ridge, barely ten…