thanks so much for posting this picture, I was trying to picture yorkshire as i read Secret Garden as part of my family is from there but i have never had occasion to visit. the closest i have come is the Peak district. my grandmother, who is 88, reminded me a few weeks ago that she wants me to check into some land in this area that she might have inherited (its a long story involving disowned descendants, racehorses and documents destroyed in WWII during the blitz) .. after looking at your picture, i'm tempted to go to yorkshire anyway just to ramble about and who knows, maybe we're rich, or if not, maybe i could turn the story into a novel ...

Thanks for that picture, it is not what I imagined it to be as I read the book.

quote Thomas Hood



That depends on the time of year Thomas Hood.

My Lancashire moor has peat and bogs, not sure about Yorkshire, but it is a very large County.

In Lancashire and Yorkshire the heather can be quite feeble in some years. Scotland has the best heather.

giselle:

The North Yorkshire moors are very wild and beautiful. Often raining and windy. When the sun does shine, the skylarks sing and it is glorious.

In hot summers we used to slide down the dry grass slopes on tea-trays!

Farmgirl:

I'm glad the picture helped. That is my grandson standing on the path, but that is a place called Malham and it has a huge land-fault so that schools often go there on field-trips to study the geography. There is a lot of geography in Yorkshire!!

The paths would not be so well kept in more remote places. However, my moors had a a Roman road across them, almost hidden by the grass.

You slid on tea-trays on grass? I love it ... it's just so .. British. We used bits of cardboard on snow or preferably ice. Did you ever get in trouble for wrecking the tea trays? I mean, you must have hit a rock or two?

Giselle:

The Couch Grass is very course and dry and very slippery, even to just walk over. So if you could beg an old tea-tray from home, that made an excellent sledge.

Actually, I used to use my blackboard. It was just a thin piece of wood painted black, and didn't take the chalk very well anyway. It became wharped to the shape of my bum through being used to slide down the slopes. Much more fun than being chalked on.

Today, because of these posts, I have been remembering when I was about five years old and staying with my Aunt during the summer holidays. She had a small-holding with some hens and three or four cows. I pinched an old umbrella and used it as a sunshade for one of the cows, which was lying down in the field. The cow rolled over and crumpled the umbrella. I put it back from where I'd taken it and Keith, the little boy next to me in age, got the blame for breaking it. No one would suspect little innocent me and I never owned up.

In college, we would get the serving trays from the cafeteria and use them as sleds in the snow. Every year, the staff would go on expeditions to locate the 20 or more trays that were missing.

is there heather growing everywhere like in the book? I would love to see pics of that.

Farmgirl - when the summer arrives I will post some pictures of the heather for you.

However, this is what our moors look like this week:-

that is beautiful. I would love to go to England, I would even consider moving there.

Those pictures make me want to jump inside and walk and walk and walk.

A land built for walking, that's for sure.

Penelope, re your first picture with your grandson standing on the pathway, I'm curious about the pathway ... is this an ordinary path or a road (hard to tell the scale but looks like a path). And do you know if the stones are 'natural' or have been quarried and split so they are flat?

Thanks for enriching this discussion with your beautiful photographs and wonderful memories, Penelope. It's so good to have your voice back in the conversations. Thanks also for your perspective that is a little nearer to the world of the book than ours is, not only on this topic of what the natural world is like, but also things like Mary's treatment of her Ayah as a departure from the norm which you found almost as upsetting as her mother's treatment of her. As I was just catching up on this thread I noticed (and I'm sure others already have) a possible Biblical allusory meaning for the choice of the names Mary and Martha for the two girls in the story. What did others think of that?

I think you are very alert. I could use a Mary now as I am now dealing with (I believe) a case of the hysterics:



A hypochondriacal aunt has laid down to die, and I don't see any way to get her up.

Tom