Tag: medieval
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Fat Betty: The North York Moors’ Most Deceptively Named Landmark
Standing at the head of Rosedale, on the loneliest stretch of Danby Moor, sits a stone that has outlived every joke made about it, and at least one attempted burglary. Fat Betty is nothing grander than a squat wheelhead cross, its shaft long gone, its base whitewashed like a garden gnome given ideas above its…
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Danby Wiske’s Tympanum: Elementary, Said Pevsner
A one-way ride to Scorton, near Catterick. New territory. Looking for something worth a detour, I found Pevsner. Nikolaus Pevsner spent decades cataloguing every building in England worth a second look. He had noted the church at Danby Wiske. “The only Norman tympanum in the North Riding still in situ,” he wrote. “On it three…
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Shitlington: A Cross, a Fair, and Eight Centuries of Unfortunate Spelling
In the Peak District sits a hill called Shatton Moor. My Duke of Edinburgh groups used to home in on it every time, like pigeons to a statue, and the jokes wrote themselves. The name is almost certainly Old English. “Scēat-tūn” — a corner of land plus a farmstead. “The farm on the edge.” Dull,…
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A Glimpse of the Frontier: Black Middens Bastle House
In the 16th century, the “Debatable Land” sitting between England and Scotland had no time for national loyalty. Survival was a subscription service, and missing a payment was bad for your health. We now think of “blackmail” as something that happens to politicians on laptops. It was, in fact, invented here, as a perfectly formal…
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Glettna Kirk: A Church Nobody Finished
Shetland has no tidy villages. The communities bleed into each other, and a visitor who tries to pin down where one ends and the next begins will give up before long. Unst is no exception. Which makes Glettna Kirk easy to miss. Just outside what passes for the edge of Uyeasound, beside the road, a…
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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…
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The Castle That Time, Fire, and a Small River Are Finishing Off
That eroded mound is Tarset Castle, in the North Tyne valley. The steep, undercut flanks show the ongoing damage caused by the Tarset Burn. The gentle green mound does not look like much. It is, in fact, all that’s left of a castle that was once a record-holder, a border fortress, a bonfire, a quarry,…
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Lanercost Priory
Founded in 1169, Lanercost was home to a community of Augustinian canons devoted to a life of prayer and service. It looks like a ruin. It is not entirely one. The nave of the priory church has been a working parish church since the 1740s — simultaneously a medieval wreck and a living place of…
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The Pale — Playground of the Percys
Viewed here from Percy Cross Rigg, Capt. Cook’s Monument is just about visible on the highest point of Easby Moor. This eastern end, in the parish of Kildale, is known as Coate Moor and those unforested fields on the spur are labelled “The Pale” on Ordnance Survey maps. It is a relic of one of…
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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…