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.

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. It explains how to shuffle between map bearings and compass bearings by adding or subtracting magnetic variation.

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 successes, though it did at least offer a way to share the sadder news as well.

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 flavour.

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 upon a stone on Bilsdale West Moor bearing a solitary “T”, standing there as if daring anyone to ask why.

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 since given up the ghost.

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 farms, scattered across the slopes with the usual calm that comes of livestock and weather.

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 outlasted him.

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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 sands, clays and gravels filled with boulders carried all the way from Scotland.

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 posterity cares about their scribblings. With GPS now doing the clever work, the trig pillar is little more than a monument to a method most walkers recall only vaguely, muttering something about triangles before wandering off to check their phones.

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.

The morning sky was as clear as one could hope for December, though the Cleveland Hills had chosen to hide beneath a bank of cloud. One could call it an orographic cloud, if one wished to sound as if one had paid attention in geography lessons. The term comes from the Greek oros for mountain, which is rather generous for the Cleveland Hills, but let us humour ourselves.

Barningham Moor lies high in the Northern Dales between the Ure, Swale and Tees, a stretch of upland that most travellers notice only as a vague rise on the horizon while speeding along the A66. I have passed it for years without realising there was anything remarkable up there at all. From its upper slopes, on a day less hazy than the one we had this morning, although that was super, the view is said to reach as far as Durham Cathedral.

And so we stumble into December, once the proud tenth month of a Roman calendar designed by people who thought it wise to leave sixty days of winter adrift like sheep in a snow drift. Eventually they realised this was a fool’s errand, tacked on January and February, and shuffled December to twelfth place. One is tempted to ask what the Romans ever did for us, though the answer is usually far less thrilling than the storytellers claim'December', Wikipedia,<

Today brings a double milestone for those in England and Wales who find the open air rather more enticing than the sofa. It is twenty-five years since the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 marched through Parliament and twenty years since its promised freedoms finally reached the boots of the public. Since then, the way we tread upon our hills and moors has changed with all the subtlety of a cavalry charge.

This boundary stone on Great Ayton Moor stands on its highest point as though it has nothing better to do than provide a focus to anyone passing by. A glance at the O.S. map shows this top lies on a junction of a Public Bridleway between Gribdale and Hutton, plus two Public Footpaths approaching from the west, one along the parish boundary and the other from the old farmstead at Summerhill.

A photograph dominated by bracken in its dry, reddish-brown winter state. From Gribdale Gate, the narrow road winds down beside the beck which marks the parish boundary between Great Ayton and Kildale. In the shadowed south side of the dale, the conifers of Coate Moor plantation rule. This abundance of bracken across the northern slope once caught the eye of Dr Frank ElgeeElgee, Frank.

One from Tuesday’s little jaunt to Whitby. I had fancied a stroll along the coastal path to Saltwick, though the weather had other ideas. A mischievous wind and a steady parade of squalls were doing their utmost to suggest that I might prefer to remain upright. The path here is crumbling with admirable enthusiasm. One wonders how the National Park have resisted the urge to close or divert it.

One of the most striking features of Danby Dale is its parish church, standing rather alone about three kilometres from the present village. Castleton and Ainthorpe sit a little closer, yet the church remains a solitary figure in the landscape. In the photograph, it can be seen just to the right of centre, north of that wooded gill, as if keeping a quiet watch over the dale.

A rare chance to wander through the nooks and crannies of Whitby, where every turn seems to ooze history. This view from the curiously named Kyber Pass looks across the Esk towards the jumble of red-roofed houses that appear to cling for dear life to the crumbling East Cliff. High above them, standing guard against the restless sky, are the ruins of Whitby Abbey and the steadfast St Mary’s Church.

In 1894 the Northern Echo carried a grim report of a inquest into a fatality in a whinstone quarry near Nettle Hole, a place that sits a good fifty metres below any workings that make sense on a modern mapTHE AYTON QUARRY FATALITIES. Northern Echo - 20 November 1894. My first thought was that the incident must point towards…

From this viewpoint on Ryston Bank the knoll of Little Roseberry takes on a presence rather more commanding than its shy appearance on the O.S. Map, where it is denied even a ring contour. If the name Roseberry grew out of “Othenesberg”, the Old Norse for Odin’s Hill, it seems a touch peculiar that its modest sibling should have been honoured with the title of hill at all.

On Thursday the first of August 1907, Danby staged its customary ‘Riding the Boundary’, a grand ritual meant to affirm the limits of the Manor, and by extension the Parish, while also paying annual homage to the Lord of the Manor, Hugh Richard, Viscount DowneWhitby Gazette - 16 August 1907. “Riding the Boundary” at Danby. The bailiff opened the day with a ringing “

The ruined farms hidden beneath the forestry east of Cod Beck Reservoir sit like half-forgotten whispers of a tougher age. Among them, Cote Garth stands out, its broken walls sharp against the last scraps of the recent snowfall, as though the land itself is determined to remind us that someone once fought wind, rain and isolation to make a living here.