Welcome to my blog, where I take pleasure in words and pictures, be they my own or those of others. I'm a creative individual, and the crafty side I explore on my 'other blog', Picking Up The Threads, which I hope you'll visit too. I'm sure you understand that I have sole copyright of my original work and any of my contributions, so please ask if you want to use them. A polite request is rarely refused. So, as they used to say on the BBC's 'Listen With Mother' radio programme, many years ago: "Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin."

Wednesday 1 February 2017

Underneath the Arches


The kids and I in 1988 enjoying spectacular views over the North York Moors. We are standing in one of a series of ruined ‘arches', remnants of a once thriving iron industry of Rosedale. The arches are actually calcining kilns and they and the associated iron mines and the railway are listed monuments due to their historic importance. Calcining (roasting) was necessary to convert the carbonate ores into an oxide prior to smelting. You can find out more by clicking the link.


Fun to scramble down or clamber up!


In the mid-1990s a huge three year conservation project was carried out after it was revealed that one of the kilns’ firebrick linings had collapsed during the Winter. The work continues today and I would imagine that it is no longer possible to scramble over, around and under these huge monuments.

You can read in 'The Press’ about the £2.8 million Heritage Lottery Fund for a major project which is going to transform the area.

"Pioneering railwaymen, ironstone miners, steelmakers and railwaymen created a unique landscape in remote valleys across the moors during Victorian times.
The new scheme, entitled ‘This Exploited Land’, will tell about the heritage's importance in a sweeping arc of land stretching from Goathland and Grosmont through Eskdale to Kildale, Rosedale and Rosedale Abbey.
It will also encourage rare wildlife, ancient woodlands, wild daffodils and the special species of the River Esk.
Join other contributors to this week’s Sepia Saturday to see what they made of the image prompt which gave us arches and steps.


The view from above the kilns is © Christine Matthews  courtesy of geograph SE7294 under the Creative Commons Licence.

10 comments:

  1. What a wonderful way to see the landscape through the arches. It is a wonderful structure and the landscape is beautiful.

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  2. We have had holidays on the North Yorkshire Moors, but have never been to Rosedale. Your photographs are impressive, especially the view taken through the archway.

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  3. Your first photograph is beautiful. Very interesting to learn about the preservation of the kilns.

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  4. I can understand why they would no longer let you climb in and over the kilns, it must have been so interesting to be able to do so.

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  5. The arches are grand, but I'm drawn more to that patchwork of landscape -- those fields divided by treelines...absolutely lovely!

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  6. Great pictures all, but that first one is so beautifully and artistically arranged. Really special. Climbing around and above those arches looked a little dangerous, though. Was is really? Or does it just look that way?

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  7. A beautiful effect for a dramatic landscape. I've seen similar kilns in the lead mining area in Weardale, Durham.

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  8. Great views and such an interesting story. Thanks.

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  9. I wonder If calcining kilns were like the iron furnaces in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. I've never seen them and doubt any remnants are left, but I hope that they looked as handsome as these ruins.

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  10. Interesting structures, I didn't know they exists, they remind me of ancient aqueducts.

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