Category: North York Moors
-
Haggâs Gate, Clay Bank or Whatever itâs Called This Week
Another photograph from yesterday. I am standing on White Hill, the easternmost bump of the so-called Four Sisters of the Cleveland Hills and gazing across the col at Haggâs Gate, or at least what used to be called Haggâs Gate, towards Carr Ridge and the highest point of the North York Moors on Urra Moor.…
-
Jack’s Short Life: From Rural Bilsdale to the Trenches of the Great War
A view from Cold Moor to Garfit Gap. The row of sheds belong to the industrial pheasant rearing farm at Whingroves, a shining example of rural diversification, if one defines success as raising battery-bred birds for folk to shoot. In 1896, however, it was just another typical mixed farm on the North York Moors, run…
-
A Dog’s Grim Discovery: A Moorsholm Murder
It began, as many grim tales do, with a dog. One cold March morning in 1857, Joseph Green, a farmer in the quiet village of Moorsholmâtucked between Guisborough and Whitbyâwas startled when his dog returned home with a gruesome prize clamped in its jaws: the leg and foot of a child. The horror of the…
-
Mother Shimbleâs Snick-needles
The famous Bluebells of Newton and Cliff Rigg Woods are having a lie-in. Give them a week, perhaps, before they are at their best. Meanwhile, the true prima donna of the woodland floor is the Greater Stitchwort, cluttering the place with its endless sprinkling of white, star-shaped flowers that seem to think themselves terribly precious.…
-
Sir George the Dragon Slayer
A picturesque bank of cloud hung over the Cleveland Hills this St. Georgeâs Day morning. A reminder that even the sky can be more subtle than patriotic flag-wavers. St. Georgeâs Day stirs about as much feeling in me as Carlin Sunday, Plough Monday or Hocktide â curious relics of a myth-soaked past, clung to by…
-
Gribdale â Gorse, Ghosts, and Geology
A view looking down onto Gribdale Terrace â a neat row of white cottages built for the quarrymen who toiled in the nearby whinstone mine and quarries. Picturesque, if one forgets what they were built for. And where exactly is Gribdale, you ask? A good question, though clearly one nobody has bothered to answer properly.…
-
Tripsdale: Following Sheep into the Abyss
âWhat shall we do tomorrow?â asked my wife, as if I had a list of thrilling options tucked up my sleeve. I suggested Tripsdale and the Ship Stoneâalso known, with thrilling regional charm, as âTâ Ship Steean.â I then asked if she had ever visited the Low Cable Stones. She had not. Not unsurprising. Getting…
-
On this Day in 1936, the Iconic Trig Pillar was Born
On 18 April 1936, a small band of surveyors gathered around a concrete pillar in a field in Cold Ashby, Northamptonshire, to begin the retriangulation of Great Britain. The previous effort, from the early 1800s, had apparently become too out-dated to be useful. Thus began the era of the trig pillar: those four-foot concrete obelisks…
-
A Bransdale Stang Stoop That Time has Forgot
Up on Gimmer Bank in Bransdale today, just above Bloworth Slack before it merges with Badger Gill to become Hodge Beck, I noticed this old piece of farming history: a âstang stoopâ, or âheaveâ, or âslip gateââback from when labour was cheap and farmers made do with local resources instead of buying five-bar gates from…
-
The Pannierman Way
A pair of ancient standing stones flank a stretch of weather-worn path known as the Kirby Bank Trod. This marvel of medieval civil engineering forms part of a so-called âLong Trodâ â a term employed because it would have required âconsiderable resource and supra-parochial organisationâ to build such an âeconomic venture of some significance.â The…