Tag: history
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The Weather According to a Dead Bishop: Forty Days of Rain
Climate change deniers blame nature for everything. Heatwaves? Natural. Floods? Just weather being weather. Human emissions? Nothing to see there. Meanwhile, chemtrail believers take a different route entirely. For them, extreme weather is no accident but a masterstroke of global puppet masters, quietly spraying secret cocktails into the sky to bend the climate to their…
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The Stone They Left Behind
A rough-cut sandstone block lies abandoned at the top of an old quarry on Ayton Bank. It first appears on the 1915 Ordnance Survey 25-inch map. One wonders what caused the sudden stop—tools downed, the block left where it was, after the time and effort it must have taken to cut it, shape it, and…
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Potter Tarn: Providing Water for Paper
If Wainwright had not seen fit to include Potter Fell in his The Outlying Fells of Lakeland, few beyond Kendal would know it existed. Potter Tarn, however, is another matter. Along with Gurnal Dubs, it is one of the fell’s more prominent tarns. Both are favoured for wild swimming, though anyone entering Potter Tarn does so…
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Smardale Bridge — Drovers, Rebels, and Spies
Looking upstream along Scandal Beck above Smardale Bridge, where an old drovers’ track once crossed the river. The packhorse bridge here, likely built in the 18th century, stood beside a pub known as the Scotch Inn. It served the Scots drovers who passed this way with herds of cattle and sheep, bound for the markets…
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The West Lodges of Ormesby Hall
A blistering day, not ideal for digging holes, yet that was the task—installing bollards to keep after-hours dog-walkers from turning the entrance grass verges of the National Trust’s Ormesby Hall into a car park. Still, it offered a good excuse to admire the West Lodge gates, which manage to look imposing even from the rear.…
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Because It’s There: Tourists on Roseberry
Another day, another climb up Roseberry. I often wonder when someone first made the effort simply for the sake of it—“because it’s there,” as Mallory said of a rather taller peak. When did the first tourists arrive? And what exactly counts as a tourist? With its sharp outline and looming bulk, Roseberry Topping has always…
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Freebrough Hill — Where Arthur Waits
This hill has loomed over the Guisborough to Whitby road for generations, a constant, brooding shape on the horizon. Its symmetry is so precise, its position so solitary, that people have long refused to believe it is natural. Clearly the work of men. Or gods. Or giants. One giant in particular: Wade, whose name is…
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“HORRID MURDER AT ESKDALE NEAR WHITBY”
So screamed the headline of the Yorkshire Gazette on 18 September 1841. The grim report told of the brutal killing of 61-year-old Mrs Robinson, murdered alone in her home at Eskdaleside, near Sleights. Her husband, William Robinson, a yeoman farmer of decent standing, had gone to Egton Fair that day. His servants were out in…
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In Search of Pannierman Pots, Here is Long Stone Instead
I have long been interested in ancient transport routes across the moors, so I was pleased to come across some recent research on routeways in the North York Moors. These are vast landscape features, part of a tangled network linking places across great distances. Yet they are also intimate spaces, shaped by footfall, hooves, wheels,…
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Bombweed, a Hall Built of Basalt and German POWs
The vivid pinks of Rosebay Willowherb blaze across summer landscapes, yet most pass them by. Known as Fireweed, it is often the first plant to reclaim burnt ground. That was not always the case. The Georgians treated it as a rarity, grown in gardens rather than spotted in the wild. Even in 1853, the Reverend…