Category: North York Moors
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Iron Age on the Moors: Percy Rigg’s Hidden Houses
For centuries, five Iron Age round houses sat quietly on this ridge in North Yorkshire, and nobody noticed. Not bad for a neighbourhood that was probably occupied for over 300 years. The site was only spotted in 1962, when Fred Proud of Sleddale Farm found it and reported it to local archaeologists Roland Close and…
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Fog, a Hollow Way and a Reservoir That Never Was
The watershed between the River Esk and River Rye tributaries was today more than a geographical line. It was a weather frontier. While Castleton and Westerdale basked in spring sunshine a mile or two away to the north, Farndale sulked under a damp mist so thick you could almost wring it out. From the aptly…
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Hanging Stone Dam and the Fall of Sir Joseph
The pond in this photo was built in 1880 by Sir Joseph Whitwell Pease to power hydraulic machinery at his Home Farm half a kilometre downstream. It served that purpose until the 1950s, after which it became a swamp. Local volunteers restored it in 2004/5. Known originally as Hanging Stone Dam, it sits at the…
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Pirates, Sugar and Stone: The Carlton Bank Alum Works
Some industrial stories begin with a balance sheet. This one begins with a privateer’s cannon. The alum works at Carlton Bank, gorged out of the Cleveland Hills, has a history that stretches from the Caribbean to the Cleveland coast. It is, when you look closely, a rather splendid tale of sea dogs, sugar barons, and…
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Roseberry’s Hedge: Ten Years in the Making
Ten years ago, I helped the National Trust plant 4,000 saplings along the north west boundary of Roseberry Topping, where it meets the fields known as Rye Banks. The North York Moors National Park Traditional Boundary Scheme footed the bill. Hawthorn made up the bulk of the planting, with blackthorn, maple, hazel and dog rose…
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Cool Burns and Warm Fictions
Ah, that warm, pungent smell of a recent so-called “cool burn”. Now, I do not know whether these moorland burns truly reduce the fuel load and help prevent catastrophic wildfires as it is claimed. I will heed the scientists and the fire brigade experts, but I am immediately sceptical of lobby groups pushing a single…
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The Smell of Progress
A lone tractor crawls below Roseberry Topping, spreading muck across an upland field. The scent hits you before the sight does. This, believe it or not, is what civilisation smells like. That machine is just the latest chapter in a very old and very smelly story. Centuries of farmers knew something we have mostly forgotten:…
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From Gold Chains To Pink Fur: Our Great Squirrel Blunder
Humans have an impressive ability to create a total dog’s breakfast of the natural world. We take a creature from the other side of the ocean and decide it would look nice in a park. Now we spend millions of pounds every year trying to fix the mess. Whilst keeping our native red squirrels as…
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Not Guilty: The Carlton Bank Case, 1972
Carlton Bank. Even on a dreich day there was a surprising number of folk around. Yet, in May 1972, it was the scene of one of the more extraordinary legal cases the North Riding has ever seen. A potato merchant named Kenneth Saddington drove five miles up to these moors one Saturday night with a…
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Dale Head—Fire, Rumour and a Long Silence
Ryedale demanded a break. The old Stephen Thwaite farmstead has an irresistible collection of “stoups” and “hemmells” worth ten minutes of any cyclist’s time. Then the sun did what the sun does when it wants to make a point. It threw a spotlight clean across Wheat Beck and landed it squarely on Dale Head House.…