Penny Nab at Low Tide: A Hunt for a Lost Tramway

One from Sunday, when the tide finally allowed a proper wander along the scar below Penny Nab at Staithes, hunting for traces of a narrow gauge tramway that once skirted the base of the cliff at Jet Wyke, heading towards Old Nab. Whatever survives has spent two hundred years being battered twice daily by the North Sea, so do not expect much.

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Unmanaged Blaze on Hutton Moor

Experts love a crisis. Last year, the tiny heather beetle was going to end the world as we know it. They claimed the infestation had turned the moors into a massive tinderbox of kindling—they may well have been right. But they also predicted a grey, withered future for the purple foliageBarton, Andrew. "Beetle-hit North York Moors pose 'massive fire risk' - BBC News." BBC News, 13 Oct.

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When the Sea Brought Fashion to Staithes

Storms wash up all sorts along this stretch of coast. Driftwood. Old rope. The odd sad welly. Coal—see my previous post. In October 1992 they washed up a different windfall. A forty foot shipping container broke loose from its vessel during a gale and settled below these cliffs at Hole Wyke, three miles from Staithes. Inside sat crate upon crate of children’s clothes and T-shirts, still wrapped in plastic, still waiting for a shop that would never see them.

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Yorkshire Day and a Flag That Behaves Itself

Here we are, then. The World Cup finished weeks ago, the face paint is long gone, yet flags are still tie-wrapped to lamp-posts and hung from windows like a rash that will not clear up. During the football, everyone let it slide. Bunting, jolly, harmless. The tournament is over now, though, and flags remain, and the mood has curdled from carnival to something closer to a warning.

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The Swidden That Would Not Turn Purple

Here, on Great Ayton Moor, a swidden burnt a few seasons back to bring on fresh heather for the grouse. But judging by the tussocks, deer-grass had other plans. The plan was for heather — tender purple shoots laid on like a buffet for red grouse. What grew back was this: a spiky green swathe of deer-grass, tussock after tussock, heather reduced to the odd shy patch squeezed in between.

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The Symbolic Shield: Decoding the 800-Metre Wall of Scarth Wood Moor

Scarth Wood Moor looks like empty, timeless terrain, but under the heather sits what used to be a busy Bronze Age settlement. This worn line of boulders belongs to an orthostatic wall, which is a fancy way of saying a prehistoric boundary made from big standing stones placed at even gaps. Frank Elgee first noted it in 1935, and back then it was thought to be a scrap of wall just 82 metres long.

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Haggesgate

Walking down from Carr Ridge towards the col at Clay Bank never fails to set me wondering. Is this deep gash in the hillside natural, or did centuries of boots and hooves carve it out, a proper holloway worn into the moor? Go off-piste and you will come across other gullies running alongside it, plainly the same old path splitting and rejoining, a braided track laid down by generations who never once wrote down where they were going.

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The Great Heather Gamble

Europe is burning, and nobody has bothered telling the weather. Wildfires in Spain and France are breaking records while the Cairngorms also feels the heat. The North York Moors is not a stranger to this chaos. A massive blaze last year turned twenty-five square kilometres of one moor into a cinderWinn Darley, George. "Wildfire In The North York Moors – A Detailed Account." Moorland Association, 6 Oct.

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Slingsby — A Street Village

Retirement was meant to cure the Monday morning blues. It has not. That grim feeling still turns up right on schedule, uninvited and entirely unbothered by my pension. So the mind wanders back to the weekend, when we cycled south into the Howardian Hills, fifteen miles of Corallian limestone squeezed between the Vale of York and the Vale of Pickering. They take their name from the Howard family, whose great pile at Castle Howard still lords it over the countryside like it owns the place, which, in fairness, it rather does.

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The Sponsored Swim That Ended an Era

Standing below these rusted iron stanchions, I cannot help reflecting on how coincidentally a name can turn up twice in as many weeks. Kathleen Elizabeth Mary Cooper Abbs, the last person to live in the Arts and Crafts house built among the ruins of Mount Grace PrioryFraggle. "Mount Grace Priory ~ part 4." Fraggle ~ rocking a camera across the Universe, 03 July 2015.

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The Mock Medievalism of Carrmire Gate

Carrmire Gate is enormous, and this is merely the East Turret, which tells you everything about scale at Castle Howard and nothing about sense. Nicholas Hawksmoor designed this limestone monster in 1725 as the very first thing a visitor sees on the approach to the house. It was the last part of the whole entrance to get built. Perhaps an afterthought.

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Butterflies, Thistledown and the Long Arm of the Law

Memory plays odd tricks. Yesterday mine dredged up a scene from some Disney film, the heroine wandering through a meadow with butterflies and birds fluttering about her like a doting entourage. Animators loved surrounding young women with woodland creatures. Saved them writing dialogue. This field needed video, really, to do it justice. Thistles stretched as far as the lens could see.

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The cliffs at Hummersea, where the sea gave back what it took

In February 1886, the barque Cervantes hit rocks off Kettleness in a snowstorm, her crew tossed about all night in open boats before rescue found them. That is the shipwreck story. But the coast had another story waiting, and this one belongs to the people, not the ship. Eleven hundred tons of coal and coke came ashore along the cliffs between Hummersea and Boulby, and the district descended on it like the tide itself.

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A Crow’s Foot on a Gatepost

The gate itself is nothing to write home about. Seven metal bars, a stone post, the sort of thing you would walk past without a second glance. The gatepost once had a partner, another “stoup” standing guard on the other side, but that would have got hauled out years ago so tractors could squeeze through. Progress, of a sort. Look closer, though, and there is a carving on that post that turns up in the most unlikely places.

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The Spirit of the Past: When a Carthusian Ruin Became a 1,500-Person Stage

In 1927, the quiet ruins of Mount Grace Priory got a shock. For three days they were dragged out of their peaceful retirement and dressed up in the “forgotten pomp and ceremony” of a proper Roaring Twenties do. Grief did it. Lady Florence Bell had lost two heirs in 1926, and the Historic Pageant of Mount Grace was her way of grieving out loud, in costume, with a cast of thousands.

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The Devil’s Leap

The Devil, it turns out, once lost an argument and dropped a boulder in a strop. That is the sort of local history we deserve more of. Walk along to Roulston Scar and you are standing on a summit 1,246 feet above the level of the sea, with the Vale of York and the Vale of Mowbray spread before you, and the West Riding and the Cumberland Hills visible in the distance on a clear day.

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Hood Grange

Behind this somewhat sad stone farmhouse lies eight centuries of quiet drama. A hermitage stood here before 1138, when monks moved in under Roger de Mowbray’s patronage.“Hood Abbey.”Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hood_Abbey. Accessed 19 July 2026. Cistercians took the place over, then shuffled off to Old Byland after five years, then on to Byland Abbey proper. Augustinian canons from nearby Newburgh Priory moved into the empty buildings, and Hood settled down as a small dependent cell of that priory.“Newburgh Priory.” Yorkshire Moors, …

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The Squeeze: Roseberry Topping’s Disappearing Footpath

Climbing Roseberry Topping ought to be one of the simple joys in life. Not on this stretch. Here it is a “stinging” ordeal, and no mistake. A modern post-and-wire fence runs alongside a maturing line of hedge saplings, squeezed in next to the old boundary. They were planted a few years back. The result now is a corridor of thigh-high nettles, bramble stems and general undergrowth.

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Petlar’s Bridge Quarry: A Brief Flirtation with Industry

I must have cycled past this old quarry near Petlar’s Bridge a couple of dozen times or so since the plantation hiding it was felled, and it has since been on my list to write about. The quarry must pre-date the Eskdale railway by half a century. One unverified internet source claims whinstone was extracted here in the 1830s and the site abandoned by the 1880s, presumably once worked outQuarry Plantation.

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Saltburn Sands From North Bank

North Bank is the steep cliff behind the Ship Inn at Old Saltburn, and not many know the National Trust owns it. I went there today for a bioblitz. That is jargon for an intensive, time-limited hunt to record every living thing on a patch of land, in this case bumblebees, butterflies, wildflowers, whatever moved or grew, my phone with its apps clutched like divining rods.

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Ragwort: The Weed That Feeds the Bees

Three heatwaves have hit Britain since spring, baking the ground and warming the seas. Humidity makes it feel worse. Soil has dried fast, wildfire risk is high, and marine life is under strain too. The Met Office, says cooler air is due soon, but rain is not, so dry days continue. Some plants seem to be thriving. Like these ragwort with a swathe of harebells as a colourful contrast.

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“F RO END”

I have caught sight of this guidestone plenty of times, hurtling past at sixty miles an hour. Stopping on the Blakey Ridge road is no small feat. A bike makes it far simpler. The stone reads “F RO END”, short for “FARNDALE ROAD END”NYMNPA HER No:  8465. Guidestone on the west side of the road south of the boundary stone known as Margery Bradley at Blakey Ridge .

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Scugdale: The Valley That Runs the Wrong Way

Scugdale does not behave the way a North York Moors dale ought to. Most valleys here dip eastward, following the grain of the rock. Scugdale cuts north west instead, breaking through the Jurassic escarpment against the run of things. Geologists have never quite settled why. It may be the leftover of a larger dale that once ran north. It may follow old fault lines.

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Percy Rigg: Iron Age Living

The heather has gone. Local archaeologists have begun to strip the vegetation back to where the 1960s excavators left off, not to dig fresh ground, but to expose what was already found and read it again with sharper eyes. The aim is a proper sequence: which house came first, which blocked which, and how five round houses on this ridge took their turns rather than standing togetherTeesside Archaeological Society BULLETIN 2024, No.28.

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Cock Howe — After the Fall

One thing that does not endear me to the moors is the endless gamekeepers’ access tracks. Miles of the stuff. Dull to run, duller to walk, but perfect for cycling, except our creaking access laws s…

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The 14-Year-Old Standing Stones

My feelings about Lord Stones Country Park sit somewhere between fondness and grudge. Our wedding guests gathered there for a run — a bottle of Champagne subtly secreted in the heather — before a c…

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Potter’s Nab: Farndale’s New Woodland

Farndale East is getting itself a new woodland, courtesy of the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust. In the intake fields below Potter’s Nab. The idea is simple enough. Trees hold soil together, and soil held…

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Easby Lane Housing Development: Uncovering the Anomalies

I climbed up to Easby Moor before the heat settled in. From the top I could clearly make out the arable field on the edge of Great Ayton that has been earmarked for 68 new houses. It is the field j…

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