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| Treads handle | @Fhithich |
Biodiversity Net Gain: Green Promises, Thin Results
The UKās Biodiversity Net Gain scheme was meant to be our environmental shield. A simple promise that development would leave habitats āin a measurably better state than they were before.ā It is sold as a key tool to halt ācatastrophic declines in nature.ā Fine words, neatly printed.
The proposal to develop an 1 ...
http://www.fhithich.uk/2026/02/10/biodiversity-net-gain-green-promises-thin-results/
Redcar: Where Time Was Scoured Clean
When Storm Chandra recently lashed the North East coast, it behaved like a blind cosmic spade, scraping away millions of tons of sand to uncover a bleak, barnacle-furred graveyard. This was no run-of-the-mill blow. It delivered a rare, once-in-a-decade āunsandingā that laid bare the black, broken teeth of a 6,000-year-o ...
http://www.fhithich.uk/2026/02/09/redcar-where-time-was-scoured-clean/
Access Without Respect
A pack of a dozen mountain bikers bursts down the newly rebuilt, stone-stepped path on Roseberry Topping. Several are motor-assisted. Gravity does the rest. Gravel skitters, walkers flinch, gates are left yawning behind them. For a few loud seconds the hill is theirs, claimed by speed and noise. It looks impressive, in the way a juggern ...
http://www.fhithich.uk/2026/02/08/access-without-respect/
#NorthYorkMoors #RoseberryTopping #AccessRights #NationalTrust
The Smallest Forest on the Stump
I have discovered an app on my phone that had been hiding in plain sight. The āMagnifierā. A small thing, yet it has opened a door. The everyday world has shrunk and turned strange. Tree stumps become miniature forests. Rough wood turns into a map of ridges and valleys.
Peering at a pale green stand of upright stalks on the stump of a c ...
http://www.fhithich.uk/2026/02/07/the-smallest-forest-on-the-stump/
Grief with a Power Tool
In medieval churches, the pauperās voice often survives with their graffiti remembering loved-ones on the walls and pews ā essential memorials for the 95% of society who couldnāt afford headstones. Today, this vernacular memorialisation has turned toxic. In the North York Moors beneath the monument to Capt. Cook, a sandstone cragānaturally beautiful ...
Hob Holes: Where the Hob Lived and the Jet-Diggers Evicted
Runswick Bay takes its character from the Hob Holes, raw wounds in the shale cliffs cut by the North Sea going about its daily vandalism. They are not just the work of water on stone. They are the blank spaces where memory used to live. In those gaps sat the Hob, a local figure of some stan ...
http://www.fhithich.uk/2026/02/05/hob-holes-where-the-hob-lived-and-the-jet-diggers-evicted/
When the Monks Assarted Bilsdale
In windswept Bilsdale, a ring-fence of bank and ditch at Garfitts and a scatter of medieval sherds tell a story not often told. This was not always a quiet dale of lonely farms. For a brief, brittle spell it was a proving ground, a place where organised power tried to turn moor and forest into profit and permanence.
The thirtee ...
http://www.fhithich.uk/2026/02/04/when-the-monk-assarted-bilsdale/
Shoring up the Leven
I have been fretting about the riverbank by Holmes Bridge at Little Ayton for a while now, the way you fret about a loose tooth. Each flood leaves that electricity pole looking more exposed, more hopeful of a swim. And every time the river rises, the public footpath from the bridge looks closer to stepping on to an island. It sits on one of my regula ...
More Than a Water Tower
At first glance, the stone tower at Ingleby Arncliffe looks like a small, rugged castle left behind by history. It is easy to imagine it as a lookout, guarding the Cleveland Hills. But its story is not about defence or conflict. It is about hope, craft, and a quiet promise made for the future. This is not simply a water tower. It is a work o ...
SolmÅnaĆ¾ ā Cake, Mud, and Lowered Hopes
It is SolmÅnaĆ¾. Cake Month. A rare cause for cheer in the damp gloom of February.
In the Anglo-Saxon calendar, SolmÅnaĆ¾ sat where February is now. It marked a time when offerings were made to pagan gods, back when England was less Christian and more heathen. The idea was simple. Feed the gods and hop ...
http://www.fhithich.uk/2026/02/01/solmonath-cake-mud-and-lowered-hopes/
#Aireyholme #Gribdale #NorthYorkMoors #EarlyMedieval #history
