Category: North York Moors
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A view of Swainby from Scarth Nick …
… but the point of interest is not the village of Swainby, nor the wooded Whorl Hill on the far right. It is the field visible in the between the gap in the treeline on the left. Or more specifically the isolated tree in that field. It is around about here that a stone coffin…
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The Wishing Stone
This has been on my to-do list since the spring after reading a blog post on the Arcanum web-site. It’s a large, deep, circular basin on a boulder on Ingleby Moor that is speculated to have be manmade and used for ritual purposes: the making of wishes or prayers, or curses and so on. As…
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Making a mountain out of a mole-hill
Cringle End, overlooking the tiny village of Kirkby. Or should that be Kirby? The name suggests some antiquity, ‘the farm by the church’, from the Old Scandinavian word for church kirkja, but the structure of the modern church is pretty much Georgian. That an earlier church did exist is without doubt. It was given by…
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Ingleby Stone Quarry Company
A wander from Bank foot on a bright sunny morning with clear views of the Cleveland Hills. This is from abandoned sandstone quarry on Greenhow, a quarry operated by the Ingleby Stone Quarry Company, the stone from which was lowered down to the Rosedale Railway by an incline known as Wren’s Incline. The flat basin…
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Percy Cross Rigg
These posts often result from a faint memory which I then spend an hour or so trying to verify or research further in the evening — it beats watching ‘Strictly …’. But then, every so often, I plunge head first down a rabbit hole after I’ve pressed the post button. Yesterday was a case in…
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Leven gorge, Kildale
A rather dull and murky walk home from Kildale. The estate have been opening up the gorge, yet further restricting access to the river and waterfall. Today, 19th October, 1536 is the day Henry VIII got tough on those who took part in the Pilgrimage of Grace. In a letter to the Duke of Suffolk,…
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Scarth Nick
In the 18th and 19th centuries, Scottish drovers breasted this cleft in the Cleveland Hills driving their cattle to southern markets along the Hambleton Drove Road after fording the Tees at Yarm. It has probably used in prehistory, by the Romans and in medieval times. Today’s tarmac road winds up the climb from Swainby taking…
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Roseberry from Larners Hill
A bank of cloud still smothers Little Roseberry while big brother is clear under blue skies. By the time I made my way around there, the cloud had dissipated. As something new, I thought about doing a somewhat arbitrary ‘on this day’ posting, so I pulled up the Daily Mail for 15th October fifty years…
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Grime Moor
On rather dull overcast day with the National Trust on their Bridestones property. Quite a windy day and, for a fleeting moment, the sun came out. To the west of the small secluded valley Dovedale Griff, which was once known locally as the ‘Doodle‘, is what remains of Grime Moor. The effect of the ploughing…
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Whorl Hill, the lair of the Worm of Sexhow
Autumnal sunshine, long shadows and a morning chill. A slight navigational error opened up this fine view of Whorl Hill, where there be dragons. Or rather one dragon, the worm of Sexhow. Thomas Parkinson wrote about it in his “Yorkshire legends and traditions” of 1888, but it was John Fairfax Blakeborough who suggested Whorl Hill…