Tag: history
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“Baa, Baa, Black Sheep!”
Ah, warm sunshine and lambs gambolling in the fields. A sure sign that Spring is here. Everyone knows the nursery rhyme. Once said to have been a proletarian cry in the Middle Ages because the tremendous demand for wool meant that farming land had been turned into pasture for sheep. Thousands of farmhands were thrown…
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Side-tracked by the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
I am slowly getting around every boundary stone on these northern moors. This one is inscribed “RY 1752”, identical to the stone 600m or so to the south west. Ralph Yoward must have had a bulk buy. 1752 — George II was on the throne; the 11 days between 3rd and 13th September inclusive were…
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Joan Hutton-Wilson Memorial
I’ve come across this memorial before, in a bracken infested copse just off the steep Trenet Bank out of Bilsdale. I was almost surprised to find it: 1968 Joan Hutton-Wilson who loved Bilsdale Not that I thought it would have disappeared. The main photo is the view from the memorial. Chop Gate is centre, the…
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Gisborough Priory
Called in at Gisborough Priory to look at the ruins that are dominated by the iconic east window. It took a while to frame this view, the grounds were swarming with students from the sixth-form college. It was good to see so many young people relaxing and enjoying their surroundings. But I wonder if those…
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Cliff Rigg and Great Ayton from Roseberry
We are informed from Great Ayton near Gisborough, in Yorkshire; that a mad Cat has lately bit two Women, a Horse, and also several other Creatures at some Miles Distance from the Place it belonged to. As it is found by Experience, this Malady (which is much more terrible in the Human Species than Death…
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High Street’s Roman Road
Or is it? The first reference to a Roman Road over the 828m high fell High Street appeared in a book published in 1814 by John Britton and Edward Wedlake Brayley: ‘The Beauties of England and Wales, Or, Delineations, Topographical, Historical, and Descriptive, of Each County‘. In spite of some Victorian excavations, when nothing conclusive…
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Sandwick from Gowbarrow
A view across Ullswater from the mighty heights of Gowbarrow fell. On the opposite shore, Sandwick lies at the junction of Martindale and Boredale separated by the ridge of Beda Fell. Patches of snow on Rampsgill Head. Martindale once boasted a public house, the Star Inn, now a farm called Cotehow. Dorothy Wordsworth recalls dining…
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Nunnington Hall
This National Trust property is tranquilly situated on the banks of the River Rye. Built on the site of a Saxon homestead it’s a place that oozes history. The earliest part of the south-facing house dates from the mid-16th-century but most is 17th-century work carried out for Richard Graham, first Viscount Preston and Master of…
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Sir Alfred Pease
“I always considered that the best, highest and most difficult pheasants in England were the ones sent over the guns from Hanging Stone and the hill tops of Hutton and Pinchinthorpe, for they were not only very high and fast, but divers and twisters. I see guns on November 21st and 22nd shot 562 of…
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Kildale girl awarded the R.S.P.C.A.’s Gold Medal
On the 10 July 1930, the Nottingham Evening Post published the following story: HEROIC GIRL. PERILOUS DESCENT INTO MINE SHAFT TO RESCUE A SHEEP. GOLD MEDAL AWARD. The story of a Kildale (N. Yorkshire) girl’s bravery in rescuing from a disused stone mine a sheep which had been lost in a snow-storm has just been…