Roseberry to Slapewath

This month’s leg of the Cleveland Way had a complicated itinerary.

Set off at nine for the drive to Guisborough, get the number 18 bus from there towards Stokesley alighting at Newton under Roseberry. Walk over the shoulder of Roseberry Topping, up onto Hutton Moor, resplendent with purple heather. Packed lunch at Highcliffe Nab with panoramic views of the North Sea. Down through Guisborough Woods to Slapewath in good time to catch the X93 bus back to Guisborough.

 

However, the X93 bus starts in Scarborough, over an hour’s drive away so no surprise its running late, but fifty minutes! Fortunately, Café Slapewath at the Fox and Hounds is open, so a seat and a hot beverage fill in the wait. The eventual ride into Guisborough is short, the sun is still shining, and the Ironstone Miner has a tempting beer garden to the front. It’s a Wetherspoon, but they have cold Guiness (Zero of course) so a pint goes down well and I’m still home by six-thirty.

 

[Authentic selfie - 27 August 2026]

Library of the Four Winds

By pure chance our visit to Castle Howard coincided with the duration of an art installation in the Temple of the Four Winds. By artist Es Devlin and appropriately entitled the Library of the Four Winds, it took up most of the space in the tall folly to the west of the house. A high arched bookcase, reaching up into the domed roof, rotated on a reflective black revolving plinth, which provided a disconcerting perspective looking down. The bookshelves were stacked with paperbacks inserted with their spines innermost so showing only page edges to the world. Projected onto the revolving structure was text, extracts from some of the books weaved into a stream of consciousness, the words matched by a soundtrack that voiced them.

Impressive, but the words were hard to make out on the moving uneven surface, and the voice was ethereally quiet and underlaid by a droning dirge. So, while odd words, phrases, and the drift of meaning could be made out, I was left wanting  a transcript, which was not available.

 

[Authentic selfie - 20 August 2026]

Eyes on the Universe

How mind-boggling is the universe. Which is why I rarely try to comprehend it these days. Yesterday’s solar eclipse at 90% was strangely compulsive viewing. TV tuned to the BBC News channel with live streams from total eclipse sites in Iceland and Spain, while periodically popping on my eclipse glasses to check progress outside. The glasses dated from 1999 when I went down to Lands’ End to view the total eclipse there. It was cloudy that day, so they were not needed; thankfully this time it was clear, and I had a perfect view of the cosmic phenomenon.

Then, past midnight, I was back in the garden to recline in a deck chair and look skyward for meteors, the Perseid shower. Shower is a misnomer. I saw three in half an hour but in between stared at the stars and contemplated both the vastness of the universe and its impossibility.

 

[Authentic selfie - 13 August 2026]