Category: North York Moors
-
Ramsons—The Plant That Smells Like Trouble and Tastes Like Dinner
You will smell ‘em before you see ‘em. A whole wood reeking of garlic — this is wild garlic, or Ramsons, doing its thing for a couple of months each spring. The Old English word “brmsa” gave its name to places still on the map today: Ramsbottom, Ramsey, Ramsdell, Ramshorn. In AD 944, a royal…
-
Kirby Bank — A Hill With a Past
Bluebells pour down the sun-baked flank of Kirby Bank above the plain of Cleveland. Gorse burns yellow across the slopes. Below, the white walls of the Pybus Scout Centre gleam in the spring light. Beyond the green patchwork of fields, Roseberry Topping rises on the far horizon under a sky without a single cloud. A…
-
A New Corner of Bransdale
Someone went to extraordinary lengths to block up what was once a field gate. It sits in a tangle of old inbye fields to the west of St. Catherine’s House in Bransdale. The field boundaries appear on the oldest Ordnance Survey maps, so the dry-stone wall and its two gateposts, or “stoops”, were almost certainly…
-
The Last of the Lords
Roseberry Topping, North Yorkshire, 29 April 2026 — a perfect English spring morning. Out there, bluebells. In Westminster, history. Today, the current Parliament ended. And with that, seven centuries of hereditary peers sitting in the House of Lords came to a quiet end. No fanfare. No farewell parade. Just the music stopping. The story begins…
-
Arncliffe — Where Eagles Once Dared
This is the sandstone crag of Arncliffe on the western edge of the North York Moors. The name comes from the Old Scandinavian word ‘ern’ for eagle. It is a pleasant fiction that these birds once nested on these rocks. A non-descript photo perhaps but it leads on to a bit of recent news. The…
-
Cockayne: The Land of Milk, Honey, and Mumbling Clerks
Medieval peasants dreamed of a place called Cockaigne — a land of luxury and ease where roasted pigs wandered about with knives in their backs to make carving easy, grilled geese flew directly into one’s mouth, and the wine flowed freely. Streets paved with pastry. Skies that rained cheese. You get the idea. Then someone…
-
The Humble Bluebell and the Heavyweight Rift
The bluebells in Newton Wood seem a bit thin on the ground. The coverage of these flowers is not as full as in previous years. It is still early days though. In a fortnight they may well be more vibrant. Some people like the flowers. Others might remember the Scottish group called The Bluebells. Their…
-
Esklets: A Proper Muddle in a Very Small Pond
Humanity is like a persistent rash, always there and difficult to ignore. We’ve been reshaping the world to fit our needs for a very long time, demonstrating our enduring desire to adapt and make things our own. During the Mesolithic period, this high moorland plateau of Esklets was not a dry waste; it featured small…
-
The Ancient Yellow Field
Every spring, Britain turns yellow. These vast, almost aggressive swathes of rapeseed feel utterly modern — the crop of motorway verges, cooking oil, and biodiesel. Surely this is a 20th-century invention? Sort of. This is almost certainly some genetically engineered new cultivar, but let’s meet the navew. That is what our ancestors called rapeseed, and…
-
Where the Moor Ends and the Farm Begins
A shaft of sunlight illuminates the bright green fields of Farndale, seen from the old ironstone railway line on High Blakey Moor. Brown rushes surround a small peaty pool in the foreground. Dark drystone walls cascade down the hillside beneath a wide, cloud-filled sky. The view tells a story in two colours. Up here: the…