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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…
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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.…
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Living Heritage: From Cask Beer to Bloodsports
A short, uneventful stroll along the Public Rights of Way encircling Harewood House today, which remained tastefully out of sight for most of the way—probably for the best. I shall reserve for another time any reference to the minor detail that Harewood House owes its existence largely to money wrung from slavery and sugar plantations…
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Hunt Cliff — Victorian Engineering Meets Geological Indifference
It is endlessly surprising—though it really should not be—how absurdly fragile this stretch of the old Cleveland Railway remains, teetering along the edge of Hunt Cliff as though daring gravity to intervene. Originally built between 1865 and 1867, its grand purpose was to move ironstone from Loftus to the blast furnaces east of Middlesbrough. Rather…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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The Cuckoo’s Shoe
Yesterday I posted about the Cuckoo. Today, naturally, it is the Cuckoo’s Shoe — not, alas, footwear for birds, but yet another whimsical provincial name, this time for the Dog Violet. A harmless enough little flower, though my encounter this morning has sent me spiralling into yet more botanical trivia. The woodland floor is having…
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When the Fool Returns from Africa: Musings on Cuckoo Day
I was spared the indignity of rummaging through an empty pocket for loose change on my Monday climb up Roseberry Topping, which is just as well, since I heard no cuckoo. According to local superstition, today—April 14th—is “Cuckoo Day,” the date when this allegedly symbolic bird is supposed to announce its return with its distinctive…
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