As most of last week was taken up with rebuilding a laptop due to a disk failure I didn’t get as much photography done as I had hoped, but managed to visit two locations in Yorkshire that I’ve never been to, in the same afternoon, which was nice!

The first stop was at Boroughbridge to have a look at the Devil’s Arrows – a line of three Bronze Age standing stones – one next to the road and another two in a field on the other side of the road.  From here we drove up to Masham for lunch before heading off to the nearby village of Ilton and the Druid’s Temple.

Unlike the Devil’s Arrows, this is not an ancient monument, but a folly apparently constructed by soldiers returning from the Napoleonic wars in 1820 for William Danby of nearby Swinton Hall, though there seems to be some dispute about this with other suggestions that it was constructed by William Danby’s father in the late eighteenth century.

Whenever it was built, the weathered stones make a great subject, and I found isolating small parts of the temple worked better than trying to photograph the whole thing which seemed a bit confusing.

The path past the temple leads to a viewpoint over open moorland above Leighton Reservoir, on the edge of the Nidderdale AONB.  The overcast conditions seemed to suit Clints Moor very well!

On our return to the car park (and coffee at the excellent Bivouac) we stopped for a look at another standing stone set on its own in the Druids Plantation which seemed the most henge-like part of the folly.