Category: Great Ayton
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Ayton Banks Ironstone Mine
I thought I would have a look around the Ayton Banks Ironstone Mine before the summer vegetation growth takes hold, only to find when I got home that I have already posted a photo of the old drift entrance. But that was an eternity ago, in January 2015. Ayton Banks Ironstone Mine was the smallest…
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New hedge along the old tramway to Roseberry Mine
I have felt uneasy for some time about the prevalence of plastic tree guards. Their never-ending march seems to pervade into every nook and cranny of our countryside — from our National Parks to motorway verges. They are supposed to protect saplings from browsing animals and to cocoon them in a mini-greenhouse. But are they…
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Scarlet Elfcup
What do the woodland elves use to drink their morning dew? Why, elfcups of course. On the damp floor of the wooded Slacks Quarry, the vivid red of the Scarlet Elfcups are in sharp contrast to the greens of the mosses. Sarcoscypha austriaca is its scientific name, meaning from Austria, although this fungus is found…
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A late afternoon wander
A strange sort of day. Blue skies in Ayton this morning but Nunthorpe enveloped in a low lying fog, which by late afternoon was beginning to creep higher. The cottage is known as Airey Holme Cottage, built sometime in the later half of the 19th-century and recently modernised. Most of the census returns are not…
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St. Thomas’s Day
Four shopping days left and all’s quiet on Great Ayton’s High Green. Everyone’s waiting on the Government’s dilly-dallying. And it’s also St. Thomas’s Day when it’s traditional for Yorkshire lads to go around farms and houses ‘a-Thomassing‘ or ‘St. Thomassing‘; asking for ‘Thomas’s gifts‘ usually a piece of ginger bread, a slice of pepper cake,…
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Roseberry from Carr Ridge
It seems a bit of a waste. Posting a distant photo of my local hill. I had planned a wander over Urra Moor. A dull start but I could see this patch of sunlight slowly making its way over the Eston Hills. I figured sooner or later it would shine on Roseberry. I wasn’t disappointed.…
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The Tragedy of the Commons
Aireyholme was once the common pasture for the parish of Great Ayton. Parishioners had various rights on the land. Usually this would include the right right to pasture cattle, but Common Land may include other rights such as collecting wood, piscary, the right to fish and turbery, the right to cut turves of peat for…
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River Leven, Low Green, Great Ayton
I remember the day when the government U-turned on their proposal to allow privatised water companies to continue the routine dumping of raw sewage into our rivers and our beaches, after a public outcry and a rebellion by 22 Tory MPs, an amendment to the environment bill that would have provided some safeguards was voted…
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Gribdale
I’ve never really figured out where Gribdale begins and where it ends. There is no dale as such. The col between Capt. Cook’s Monument and Great Ayton Moor is known as Gribdale Gate. Beyond that, we’re into Lonsdale, so Gribdale must lie this side. But there is no valley. A stream does spring out from…
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Bullfinch sky
A dash up to Gribdale to catch the sunset. At first a disappointment but then the distant clouds caught fire. This was twenty minutes or so after the actual sunset, well into twilight; the display lasted barely five minutes before fading. According to the writer Robert Macfarlane, the Finnish call this orange afterglow of twilight…