A rainbow always makes a good photo. This one lets me talk about the ubiquitous stile. Stiles seem to have stood there since the Flood. They have not. They arrived with enclosure, which began in the 13th century and sped up in the 18th and 19th. Fields were fenced, footpaths survived, and livestock needed keeping in. By the height of enclosure, tens of thousands had been built.

In the distance, just right of centre and past the patchwork fields, lies Botton Village, mostly hidden by trees. It’s a community that has never made a fuss. In September 1955, a small group moved into Botton Hall at the head of the dale. The hall had belonged to the Macmillans, relatives of Harold Macmillan. It had been given to refugees from Austria.

Standing above the cleared plantation by ruins of Clough House there is now a clear view over Raisdale, a landscape that has been fought over by farmers and moorland for centuries. By 1148, the monks of Rievaulx Abbey controlled upper Bilsdale and its side valleys. They used Raisdale's valley floors and slopes as grazing land for sheep and cattle, on a grand scale.

Beneath the moors of the Cleveland Hills lies Kildale, a dale that looks as though nothing has ever happened there. Something did happen, though. In 1662 the estate was bought by John Turner, serjeant-at-law, of Kirkleatham. John kept to the family business of being minor Yorkshire gentry. His younger brother, William, as was the lot of younger brothers, had to find his own way in life.

An old photograph has been doing the rounds on Facebook, so I thought I would have a go at recreating it. The original is in monochrome, underexposed and a bit fuzzy. Someone has since enhanced it with AI, and the result is far sharper. There is also a colourised version knocking about, though here the AI has rather lost the plot and naively has drenched everything in green.

One coastal stretch of National Trust land lies on the cliffs north of Runswick Bay, and below it, tangled up in bramble and blackthorn, lie the bones of a Victorian ironworks. The Victoria Ironstone Company had no road in, only the sea, and in 1856 they built a mine, a works and a harbour anyway. Two years and a mere 100 tons of iron later, a landslip finished the job the sea never got round to.

This is the dale where a Marsh Harrier was shot last month. Heather in the foreground, drystone walls, scattered farms, cloud resting on the tops. Nothing in the view gives the game away, which is rather the trouble. It is yet another sad reminder of the illegal persecution that still shadows Britain's uplands. What happened On 28 August 2026 a juvenile Marsh Harrier was found in the Westerdale area, unable to fly.

I got soaked to the skin this morning, but the sky paid me back with a full rainbow over Danby Dale. Autumn showers, it seems, come with small mercies. I took the photograph at 10.28 precisely. A rainbow always sits opposite the sun, so anyone with a sense of direction can work out which way I was facing. Anyway today brings the autumnal equinox.

Sneaton Castle has been on my radar for years. Whitby's suburbs are not inspiring enough for me, though, so I never bothered going that way. Then over the weekend, I caught this view across the Esk valley and thought, well, there it is at last, and dressed rather better than I expected. The pile went up in 1820, courtesy of one "Colonel" James Wilson, a man Whitby and Sneaton once treated as something close to a local saint.

Mount Grace Priory feels like the quietest place in Yorkshire. That was rather the point. Thomas de Holland, nephew of Richard II, founded it in 1398. It is now the best surviving of the nine Carthusian houses that thrived in medieval England. The monks lived almost as hermits, spending most days alone in cells that each had a garden plot"Mount Grace Priory: History and Stories." English Heritage, …

Trees, a few old boats, a river in no hurry at the turn of the tide. Hard to believe this corner once fed a town's cookers. The 1853 Ordnance Survey map called the land The Batts. Nothing more. By 1894 a gas works stood here, and by 1914 the map named it: the Whitby Gas Company. Far below the moors, deep within the Permian rocks, gas had been waiting for millions of years.

Stand on this sandstone crag of Highcliff Nab today and the wind certainly finds you. Below lies Guisborough, all roofs and roads. Far off, the turbines of Redcar turn in the haze. In the 1990s, archaeologists dug into this very crag prior to the construction of a new stone footpath needed to address the severe erosion along the Cleveland Way. They found the remains of a Mesolithic hunting camp, with flint tools by the thousand.

In the photo above, Breck House is that farmstead in the distance, over on the left, a small stone smudge against the great sweep of Bransdale. Easy to miss. Breck House is a working farmhouse, built for function, not for show, in coursed sandstone with a pantiled roof and no airs about it whatsoever. It stands in upper Bransdale and was rebuilt after 1850, though the bones of something older linger inside.

The ewe eyes me warily across this swidden, a black patch of burnt heather on Carlton Moor. This is muirburn, the controlled burning that has scorched British hillsides for generations.Goldsmith, Ben. "Rewilding Is the Best Defence Against Wildfires." The Spectator, 2 Aug. 2026.Purves, Libby. "The Fire Next Time: The High Cost of Rewilding." The Times, 3 Aug. 2026.. Its defenders call it stewardship, plain and simple.

Standing on Carlton Bank, looking down at the sleepy village of Faceby, you would never guess how far the money behind this view actually travelled. In my previous post on the Carlton Bank Alum Works, I traced Christopher Prissick’s fortune back through Caribbean privateering and his marriage into the Codrington sugar family, and I had a hunch there was a link to slavery lurking somewhere behind it.

Roseberry Topping is really a modest hill, yet in 1761 a fictional country girl called Margery Murpoot declared it the tallest thing going. She says so in Joseph Reed's farce ‘The Register Office’, a play with about as much subtlety as a brick through a window. Her exact words, dialect and all, have survived the centuries better than most marriages:

That clear felling on Nab End has certainly opened up Lonsdale. One minute there was a commercial plantation, the next it looks like a bad haircut. Down below Percy Cross Rigg, the dale still plays its usual trick of looking peaceful. Green fields, quiet trees, the works. But scratch the surface and you find centuries of lords, monks and clerks arguing over what to call the place.

Back on my own patch after two weeks away, and the oaks in Newton Wood have gone a ghostly white, as though someone had taken a flour sifter to the whole wood. Powdery mildew turned up in Europe in 1907 and has been putting a dampener on the British summer ever since. The parasite began its life on tropical fruit trees, then set its sights rather higher and conquered ancient British oaks.

The Moray coast has a long memory, and these blocks are part of it. After the fall of Norway in 1940, Britain feared the Germans might try landing somewhere just like this: flat, open, and horribly easy to invade. So an eight kilometre chain of defences went up between Kingston and Lossiemouth, known simply as the Right SectorHistoric Environment Scotland. trov.scot.

Culbin is a forest made by man, not by nature. Scots and Corsican pines were planted here in the 1930s to pin down dunes that had swallowed whole farms and refused to give them back. Three centuries ago, sand buried a whole estate of sixteen farms, and it has stayed buried ever since. Before the pines, this was five miles of bare sandhills, over a mile wide in places.

Duffus Castle sits on a man-made mound of gravel in Moray, looking like a sandcastle a giant might have built. That impression is not far off the truth. The first castle here went up around 1150, made entirely of wood, started by a Flemish mercenary called Freskin and finished by his son William, who swapped his surname for de Moravia, “of Moray.” Stone did not arrive until after 1305.

Top tip: do not put blind faith in the OS App when planning a route. Switch on the “Precise point info” layer at the very least, though in this case “Blocked path” would have been a masterpiece of British understatement. I have seen that same warning slapped on a fallen twig or a bit of squelchy mud, the sort of thing you step over without breaking stride.

A hundred years back, this crooked notch in the Findochty coastline was not a place for a stroll. It was a shipyard, thick with the noise of wooden steam drifters going up, tall as the houses around them. The story starts with Thomas Mackenzie, a ships carpenter from Dumbarton who came to Findochty on holiday in 1900 and, rather than switching off, spotted a business opportunity in the rocks.

Findlater Castle does not so much sit on the cliff as clings to it, and the history behind it is stranger than the ruin lets on. The first mention of a stronghold here dates to 1246, and King Alexander III had it repaired in the 1260s to guard against Viking invasion. It did not go to plan. The Norwegians took and held the castle for some time, before losing their grip on Scotland after Largs.

An information board stands nearby the well, quoting local caretaker Charles M Napier. He was certain the building was Roman. His proof was the doorway. It measures out in neat metres, he wrote, and that alone told him the builders worked in Roman measurements.Napier, Charles M. “The Red Well at Whitehills.” Whitehills & District Community Council, Accessed 4 Sept.

The Bridge of Alvah, spanning the gorge of the River Deveron. This crossing was built almost one hundred years after James MacPherson is said to have lept across it. MacPherson was a fiddler, a fighter, and a thorn in the side of every laird from Elgin to Keith. Born the illegitimate son of the Laird of Invereshie and a gipsy mother, he grew up fast.

Gardenstown clings to the cliffs between Macduff and Fraserburgh, a proper cling too, as if it might slide into the sea on a bad day. Alexander Garden of Troup founded it in 1720, and yet hardly anyone calls it Gardenstown at all. Locals stick with Gamrie, the old parish name, borrowed straight from the bay itselfGARDENSTOWN. Buchan Observer and East Aberdeenshire Advertiser.

I know the name from the Shipping Forecast, tucked between Cape Wrath and Berwick-upon-Tweed, and yet I have never set foot here. Odd, that. A name can live in your head for years before the place ever does. The Aberdeenshire coast does not do gentle. Gurly rocks and cliffs run for miles, broken here and there by sand, shingle and boulders, and for centuries this stretch chewed up sailing ships that strayed too close on a lee shore in bad weather.

Every summer for close on thirty years we have travelled north on the M90 past a mighty scar of an opencast coal mine. I have no early memories of it; my eyes must have been blind to the ugliness. Ten years or so ago it began to be transformed into a country park of sortsSt. Ninian's Fife Earth Project. Atlas Obscura.

Rock climbers know it for routes with names like Megadoom and Wall of Horrors. Locals in August 1939 knew it for something rather more thrilling: espionage. Three men with foreign accents were spotted near the Crag. Naturally, panic set in. That evening, a flashing light was seen from the summit, and every good Yorkshireman drew the obvious conclusion. Secrets were being beamed straight to Berlin.

Stanghow Moor has not seen my studs in years, and it is easy to see why. It sits west of Birk Brow, bleak and boggy as you like, with barely a path or sheep trod worth the name cut through it. I can’t believe I used to run over this stuff. One path does buck that sweeping statement: this stone-flagged trod, grandly marked on the map as the Quaker’s CausewayNYMNPA HER No:  5155 Trod named Quaker's Causeway .

I learnt a new word today, and then several more chasing it. A veritable glossary. The first came from the Canadian Prime Minister. The rest turned up while I looked up what that word, a hydronym, meant. Every day’s a school day. One find was potamonymy, the study of river names, and it has set today’s post running.

Another shot from yesterday, taken not a hundred yards away. This is Penrod Spring. These days it amounts to little more than a damp patch in the heather, not easy to find. Once, though, it mattered enough that somebody built a dry-stone wall round it, by hand, stone on stone, to mark it out as worth keeping. Nothing much left to say about the spring itself, which leaves the field wide open for a rant.

Penrod Hill is a high point on Gisborough Moor, and a public footpath drops from it into Sleddale, a valley boxed in by moor on every side. The name comes from the old English word “slaed”, meaning a wide, flat valley. A lonely farmstead sits at the bottom, cut off from the rest of the world in that way only a good sheep farm ever manages.

Sheep have shaped the British uplands for centuries. Their grazing, by cattle too and, in the Tabular Hills, rabbits, kept the moors open and thrivingLindsay, Richard. "After a wildfire Britain’s moors and heaths can be green again within weeks – but the real recovery takes much longer." The Conversation, 21 Aug. 2026, Now a proper row has broken out over how many sheep the moors can bear.

Moorland fires have a way of making headlines only for as long as the ground stays dry. This summer’s blazes filled the news for weeks, and then some rain came and the story simply went quiet, whether that counts as relief or amnesia is anyone’s guess. What follows is an article from the Cleveland Standard, dated 2 April 1953, reproduced here word for word100 fires in four days on the moors.

Moorsholm Docks do not often see me cycling past, which is a shame, since the place has a story worth telling more than once. These six sunken sandstone troughs sit along the High Street of a village that could not look more like a postcard if it tried. This time round, a collared dove stood watching me with an air of mild despair, willing me to shift myself so it could get at the spring water.

Ironstone was found at Skinningrove in 1847, and the Cleveland coast has not looked back since. By 1874 the Loftus Iron Company had two blast furnaces lit and roaring above the village, built on land leased from the Maynard estate. Boom turned to bust within three years. The company went under, sold at auction in 1880 for the bare minimum bid, and the Skinningrove Iron Company rose from the wreckage.

Restoring passenger rail to East Cleveland is a dream that has flickered in and out of local politics since the last carriage left in 1960. Connecting isolated coastal villages, boosting tourism, “levelling up” a corner of the world that feels forgotten. Lovely stuff, on paper. Geology does not care about lovely stuff. The Tees Valley Combined Authority recently spent £1 million finding this out.

That distinctive headland on the horizon, Kettleness Point, has swallowed ships the way other coastlines swallow litter. Four of them tell you all you need to know about the sea’s manners, which is to say it has none. Take the Viola, a 1,900-ton steamer bound from Spain to Middleborough with iron ore. Thick fog rolled in, and nobody thought to use the sounding lead.

It looks like our Neolithic ancestors were quite fond of the easy option. While others were breaking their backs moving megaliths elsewhere in the country, the tribes in Cleveland opted for a "minimalist, energy-saving policy" for their rituals. They viewed this jagged outcrop of The Wainstones as a "ready made ritual landscape". Nature had done the heavy lifting. They utilised "earth-fast boulders" as "entrance portals" rather than wasting thousands of hours on construction.

Word on the street was that a subsidence hole had opened up near the summit of Roseberry Topping. Naturally, I decided to go and have a look. On the face of it, it was not especially dramatic. No great chasm had opened beneath the summit and swallowed half of Cleveland. Still, the hole was deep and wide enough to accommodate a leg, or possibly a small child, which must be worth considering.

A fine display of blooming heather around Captain Cook’s Monument, on a moor left unmanaged for grouse shooting. Here is a strange tale I have come across. In November 1856, the York Herald reported that a fine young man, plainly out of his senses, had been found near Lockwood Beck on the Whitby road. He was stark naked. Someone secured him quickly and found him shelter.Discovery of a Naked Lunatic.

The ghost footpath post last week got me thinking about Roseberry Well, tucked near the summit on the northern side. It has been a fair while since I last went up — or rather down, since the best approach is from above — though it is not the sort of thing likely to have wandered off. It was once known as Oswy’s Well, and folk swore by its healing powers.

The Moors are littered with standing stones, and behind each is its own little mystery. Some mark old routes. Some are gateposts that have outlived their gates. A few might be medieval crosses, worn down by weather and time until nobody can be certain. Others seem to have drawn an arbitrary line in the earth long ago: this land is mine, keep out.

You can cycle the same route a hundred times, past the same stretch of hedge and stone, and see nothing. Then one day something stops you dead. That is what happened with this bridge, tucked beside the busy A171 between Guisborough and Whitby. It has the look of great age about it, and my first guess was that it once carried the old road itself over Lockwood Beck.

Scarth Wood Moor. Third Thursday running. Too hot for ditch digging, and my back agreed with the thermometer. An early finish saved the day, though. A glance over the wall gave up a proper reward: Whorl Hill, sat there like a pudding basin turned upside down, the glacial leftover that gave Whorlton parish its name. Somewhere on that cone sits a rather sad story.

Maps are meant to be read, not buried in an app on a phone. I was doing exactly that the other day when I spotted something odd on the OS sheet: a Public Footpath, marked bold as brass, striking up Roseberry from the north-east. No one walks that way. So naturally I set off to see whether the path still existed, or whether it had gone the way of most good intentions.

It is not often these days that I find myself driving home across the moors at sunset.  By that time I’ve settled in for the night. Most cloud formations save their best trick for this hour. High cirrus, with a smattering of some lower, featherier clouds thrown in for good measure, catch the low sun in a way nothing else quite manages, and for a few minutes it the sky puts on a spectacular display.

The Crosscliffe Valley looks a quiet place. It was not so quiet on a Tuesday in 1915. A stray pellet from a grouse shoot hit the Jam Sahib of Nawanagar. He lost his right eye. This was a bit of a problem for a man who was reputed to be one of the greatest cricketers in the world. This a little rabbit hole I found myself going down a few years ago.