Category: North York Moors

  • Hagg’s Gate, Clay Bank or Whatever it’s Called This Week

    Hagg’s Gate, Clay Bank or Whatever it’s 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 Hagg’s Gate, or at least what used to be called Hagg’s 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

    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

    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 Moorsholm—tucked between Guisborough and Whitby—was 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 Shimble’s Snick-needles

    Mother Shimble’s 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

    Sir George the Dragon Slayer

    A picturesque bank of cloud hung over the Cleveland Hills this St. George’s Day morning. A reminder that even the sky can be more subtle than patriotic flag-wavers. St. George’s Day stirs about as much feeling in me as Carlin Sunday, Plough Monday or Hocktide – curious relics of a myth-soaked past, clung to by…

  • Gribdale — Gorse, Ghosts, and Geology

    Gribdale — Gorse, Ghosts, and Geology

    A view looking down onto Gribdale Terrace — 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

    Tripsdale: Following Sheep into the Abyss

    “What shall we do tomorrow?” asked my wife, as if I had a list of thrilling options tucked up my sleeve. I suggested Tripsdale and the Ship Stone—also known, with thrilling regional charm, as “T’ Ship Steean.” 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 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

    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 ‘stang stoop’, or ‘heave’, or ‘slip gate’—back from when labour was cheap and farmers made do with local resources instead of buying five-bar gates from…

  • The Pannierman Way

    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 “Long Trod” — a term employed because it would have required “considerable resource and supra-parochial organisation” to build such an “economic venture of some significance.” The…