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Septuagenarian wanderer of the North York Moors, or wherever else I happen to be. My aim is to post a daily photo of where I’ve been on www.fhithich.uk and replicate here.

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Great Ayton’s Boxing Day Ritual: Auf Wiedersehen?
In 2004, hunting foxes with dogs was banned. This did not, however, end the “sport”. It merely trimmed it back and left three flavours of “hunting” on the menu.
First comes trail hunting. This involves following a scent of animal urine laid on a route that is meant to be unknown to the riders. In theory, it ...
http://www.fhithich.uk/2025/12/26/great-aytons-boxing-day-ritual-auf-wiedersehen/
Merry MĹŤdraniht
Christmas seems to arrive earlier every year. This Christmas Eve the summit was packed to the rafters. This view follows the line of the old ironstone tramway. Now labelled a Permissive Path, it runs alongside the Public Bridleway that is Aireyholme Lane and is largely ignored, so it feels like just a box-ticking exercise.
Long before Christmas muscled its way i ...
Witches’ Butter
Even in midwinter, when the woods look like they have given up, they can still manage a bit of a show. There are splashes of colour if you bother to look. Bright fungi flare up against the gloom, set among the stubborn brown leaves still clinging to oak and beech, and the thick brown carpet of dead bracken. All this breaks up the dark damp mass of trunks, branches, an ...
A Glimpse of a Windhover
Despite spending at least two hours outdoors on most days, close meetings with nature are thin on the ground. There is the odd distant view, a brief flicker at the edge of sight, usually gone before my patience can catch up.
My bird identification skills are basic, but even I know this much. A bird that is not fleeing nor perched, but h ...
Billy’s Dyke on the High Moor
Just after the midwinter feast of 1070, William the Conqueror, fresh from Christmas in York, marched north to settle a score. His garrison at Durham had been slaughtered, and he meant to answer blood with fire. What followed was ruin on a grand scale. Villages, farms, whole stretches of countryside were wiped clean, with no one l ...
http://www.fhithich.uk/2025/12/19/billys-dyke-on-the-high-moor/
A Long View from Cockle Scar
Scar, scarp and escarpment have a knack for muddling people. The landforms overlap, and to add to the fun a scarp can carry several scars on its own back.
Despite how they look, scar is not related to the other two. It comes from the Old Norse “sker”, meaning crag, with a nod to “sg ...
http://www.fhithich.uk/2025/12/18/a-long-view-from-cockle-scar/
#CockleScar #NewtonunderRoseberry #NorthYorkMoors #RoseberryTopping #etymology #geology #NationalTrust
Roseberry Watching Over Enclosed Land
The nearest field in today’s photograph marks the site of the old farmstead of Summerhill, born out of Great Ayton’s enclosure of the common land in 1658. At that time, the commons stretched all the way to the top of Roseberry, open and shared in a way that would soon vanish.
...
http://www.fhithich.uk/2025/12/17/roseberry-watching-over-enclosed-land/
#Aireyholme #AytonBank #GreatAyton #NorthYorkMoors #RoseberryTopping #17thcentury #history
Commondale and the Forgotten Potters of the Home Front
Commondale is a quiet village now, the sort that seems still half asleep by mid-morning. It was not always like this. The arrival of the railway changed everything. A brickworks followed, then a pottery, turning out objects of real quality. When pottery declined, production shifted again. Sanitary w ...
http://www.fhithich.uk/2025/12/16/commondale-and-the-forgotten-potters-of-the-home-front/
Chalybeate Dreams and Murky Realities
The orange colouring of this stream is a clear sign of iron salts in abundance. This is known as chalybeate or ferruginous water, a substance once held in high esteem in the 17th century when mineral waters were treated as a cure for most known ailments and several imaginary ones besides. People drank it with conviction and ...
http://www.fhithich.uk/2025/12/15/chalybeate-dreams-and-murky-realities/
The Lady Chapel
The precise beginnings of this agreeable little chapel tucked into the trees are lost to time, which is how such places like it. What we do know is that by 1397 a licence had been granted for Mass to be said here, neatly separating it from the later Mount Grace Priory, the Carthusian house nearby. A year later the land and chapel were handed over to the Priory’s founders. T ...
Lost Without Moving: Britain’s Wandering North
A cracking morning. This view looks north-east from Newton Moor, over Guisborough, out to the North Sea and whatever lies beyond it, behaving impeccably for once.
“Grid to mag, add; mag to grid, get rid” is the sort of mnemonic that lodges in the brain for life, usually thanks to the Cubs and a damp field. ...
http://www.fhithich.uk/2025/12/13/lost-without-moving-britains-wandering-north/
Solstice Greetings from Oakdale
Forty years ago, sending and receiving Christmas cards felt like a rite of passage, a quiet signal that one had stepped into adulthood and set up house. Some even embraced the annual letter, chronicling the family triumphs and tribulations for distant friends and relatives. We never warmed to the round-robin missive that trumpeted life’s succ ...
http://www.fhithich.uk/2025/12/12/solstice-greetings-from-oakdale/
Crimson Herald of the Coming Sun
This is a novelty for this long-suffering blog: a photograph taken from my very own doorstep, with sunrise still twenty minutes off and the sky already plotting its little drama.
Most people know the old saying about the red sky and the fortunes of sailors, with its murky origins somewhere in scripture and the occasional attempt to swap in a shepherd for nautical ...
http://www.fhithich.uk/2025/12/11/crimson-herald-of-the-coming-sun/
The “T” Stones of Bilsdale West Moor
The North York Moors are littered with boundary stones, each one usually stamped with a dutiful little initial, the sort of thing an aristocratic landowner might choose when feeling terribly important. An “M” for Manners, an “F” for Feversham, a “CD” for Charles Duncombe. All very neat, all very tidy. Then you stumble upo ...
http://www.fhithich.uk/2025/12/10/the-t-stones-of-bilsdale-west-moor/
The Scar on the Hill: Cliff Rigg Quarry
A dreich veil hung over North Yorkshire this morning, so I look back instead to yesterday, when the sky was clear, the air still, and the sun at least toyed with the idea of shining.
Cliff Rigg Quarry looms above Great Ayton, a cavernous rent in the hillside left behind by an industry that has long sin ...
http://www.fhithich.uk/2025/12/09/the-scar-on-the-hill-cliff-rigg-quarry/
#CliffRigg #NorthYorkMoors #history #NationalTrust #whinstone
Glaisdale’s Brief Age of Iron
Glaisdale began life as a quiet township within the parish of Danby, its name shifting through the centuries as Glasedale and Glacedale. Records from 1223 already linked it with the broad sweep of Glaisdale Moor, giving a sense of a place long settled into its landscape.
For much of its history it has been a rural dale of small ...
http://www.fhithich.uk/2025/12/08/glaisdales-brief-age-of-iron/
Glaisdale and the Enigma of T. H.
Some two hundred yards up from the foot of the lane that strains its way up Caper Hill, a dry-stone wall is built around a large orthostat. Rough-hewn at the edges and smoothed across its face, it carries a message cut by hand in the late seventeenth century. Kneeling in the damp and wind, its maker carved a declaration that has o ...
http://www.fhithich.uk/2025/12/07/glaisdale-and-the-enigma-of-t-h/
Scarth Nick and the Making of a Landscape
Scarth Nick, a dry trench bordered by steep banks of bracken and heather, stands as a striking reminder of the fierce sculpting of the great Ice Age. Around fifteen to twenty thousand years ago, a glacier from the north spread across the vale of Cleveland and pushed an icy tongue deep into Scugdale. As it moved, it scattered ...
http://www.fhithich.uk/2025/12/06/scarth-nick-and-the-making-of-a-landscape/
Before Satellites Spoilt the Fun: The Rise of Triangulation
Trig points cling to hilltops like relics from a time when humans trusted metal and masonry rather than shining toys orbiting the earth. This one on Roseberry’s summit keeps being repainted in traditional white, only to be graffited again by passing aritists who imagine post ...
http://www.fhithich.uk/2025/12/05/before-satellites-spoilt-the-fun-the-rise-of-triangulation/
A Heart over The Ship Inn
Is that a heart floating above The Ship Inn at Old Saltburn. Charming. The pilot must have been struck by a fit of sentiment, or perhaps simply bored stiff.
Back in the eighteenth century this tiny fishing village beneath Huntcliff and the ever-so-subtle Cat Nab managed to support four inns, plus enough gin shops to pickle an army. Today only the Ship survives. All of th ...
http://www.fhithich.uk/2025/12/04/a-heart-over-the-ship-inn/
