Category: North York Moors
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Cleveland Hills from Cook’s Crags
A pootle around Coate Moor. This is from Ward Nab aka “Cook’s Crags”. Not much to say that hasn’t already been said, so I’ll have to trawl my memory bank for a completely unrelated fact. So looking at the date, 7th January, what happened in years past. Well, in 1904, the Marconi Company introduced a…
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Painted Rock
My heart sank when I came across this while descending Little Roseberry. Now call me a killjoy but is this really necessary in a National Park, “our most breath-taking and treasured landscapes”. It’s only a painted pebble left in a prominent place and asking finders to post photos to a Facebook page. A craze from…
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Siss Cross
A beautiful January but marred by the smell of burning heather. And on a Sunday too. It seems like we’re just spitting in the face of the Australians. And all to maximise the grouse bag. There are some rules: heather should not be burnt where the smoke is likely to damage health or cause a…
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St. Nicholas’s “gold balls”
After the season’s festivities, the big cleanup begins. Roseberry is no different. A morning spent litter picking with the National Trust. The usual: cans, plastic bottles, little doggie presents. And plenty of orange peel scattered around, accompanied by the inevitable wet-wipe. What’s the big thing about oranges at Christmas? St. Nicholas’s “gold balls”. Of course,…
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Old gate posts, Halliday Slack
A slack is a word frequently found in the names of the very upper tributaries of moorland becks. It’s a northern word for the marshy shallow area between two stretches of rising ground. Yet Halliday Slack is a steep, precipitous gorge in the escarpment of the Cleveland Hills between Kirby and Broughton Banks. Thirty metres…
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Blencathra Mine
An intriguing long sunken pit alongside the Glenderaterra River that’s been conveniently used as a dump for rusting stock fencing. It looks like a waterwheel pit to me and probably used to provide power to pump out the shaft of the Blencathra Lead Mine which was last worked in 1875. This is the southernmost working…
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Belmont Ironstone Mine
The drift entrance to the mine which operated between 1907-1931 although no ore was extracted after 1921. It has been deliberately blocked for public safety. The brick building behind is an electrical sub-station and probably dates from 1914 when an electric sirocco fan was installed to replace the old method of ventilation by lighting a…
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Robin Hoods Butts
The large expanse of heather moorland between Scaling Dam and Danby Beacon is one of the bleakest moors and at its bleakest at the height of the winter. I am reminded of Christina Rossetti’s poem published under the title “A Christmas Carol”: In the bleak mid-winter Frosty wind made moan; Earth stood hard as iron,…
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Codbeck Reservoir
Not much wind this Christmas Day morning. The proverbial millpond. Plenty of folks making use of the perimeter path. Christmas Day, the day most Christians celebrate the birth of Christ. It hasn’t always been celebrated on this date. Prior to the 5th-century when Church leaders agreed to fix the date of the birth of Christ,…
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“Night of the Mothers”
Ah, Christmas Eve. If you were a pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon pagan you would be celebrating “Mōdraniht” tonight or the “Night of the Mothers“. We know this because the venerable Bede wrote it down in the 8th-century. However, he went no further into the traditions and customs but it is speculated that a sacrifice could have been…