Category: North York Moors
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Is “Managing” Nature the Right Thing to Do, or Just an Excuse?
It never fails to weary me how interest groups reach for academic work as a drunk reaches for a lamppost, more for support than illumination. A paper appears, and before the ink is dry it is trimmed, polished, and made to serve a house creed. We have seen the trick before, from vaccine doubters to…
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Inheritance and Oblivion on Urra Moor
On the bleak expanse of Urra Moor, a lone boundary stone stands sentinel over the heather. Winter has tried to lay its white shroud over the name FOULIS, once lord of the manor at Ingleby, but hasn’t quite succeded. It reads like a quiet obituary in stone, the record of a family slipping out of…
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From Parish Wall to Prime Minister
Despite the slush and the grey skies, snow lends even the most familiar ground a quiet grandeur. Roseberry Topping, half veiled in white, looks less like a hill and more like a stage set, its lines sharpened and its history briefly made visible. This wall climbing its eastern flank marks the old parish boundary between…
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The Track Through Hall Wood
Hall Wood in Farndale hides a solid, well-made track, the sort that suggests purpose and history. It is said to have led to a sawpit. If so, it kept its secret well today. I found the path, but not the pit. The wood was less forthcoming than the National Trust’s heritage records. Timber once mattered…
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Access Without Respect
A pack of a dozen mountain bikers bursts down the newly rebuilt, stone-stepped path on Roseberry Topping. Several are motor-assisted. Gravity does the rest. Gravel skitters, walkers flinch, gates are left yawning behind them. For a few loud seconds the hill is theirs, claimed by speed and noise. It looks impressive, in the way a…
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The Smallest Forest on the Stump
I have discovered an app on my phone that had been hiding in plain sight. The ‘Magnifier’. A small thing, yet it has opened a door. The everyday world has shrunk and turned strange. Tree stumps become miniature forests. Rough wood turns into a map of ridges and valleys. Peering at a pale green stand…
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Grief with a Power Tool
In medieval churches, the pauper’s voice often survives with their graffiti remembering loved-ones on the walls and pews — essential memorials for the 95% of society who couldn’t afford headstones. Today, this vernacular memorialisation has turned toxic. In the North York Moors, ironically beneath the monument to Capt. Cook, a sandstone crag—naturally beautiful with centuries…
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When the Monks Assarted Bilsdale
In windswept Bilsdale, a ring-fence of bank and ditch at Garfitts and a scatter of medieval sherds tell a story not often told. This was not always a quiet dale of lonely farms. For a brief, brittle spell it was a proving ground, a place where organised power tried to turn moor and forest into…
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Solmōnaþ — Cake, Mud, and Lowered Hopes
It is Solmōnaþ. Cake Month. A rare cause for cheer in the damp gloom of February. In the Anglo-Saxon calendar, Solmōnaþ sat where February is now. It marked a time when offerings were made to pagan gods, back when England was less Christian and more heathen. The idea was simple. Feed the gods and hope…
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The Conservation Walk That Has Vanished
It seems fitting to be posting this at the end of January 2026, a month that quietly marked a profound centenary. One hundred years ago, Section 193 of the Law of Property Act 1925 gave the public a legal right to access around a third of the common land in England and Wales. For the…