Almscliff Crag is a popular destination for walkers, learner rock climbers and short day-trip travellers in Yorkshire. It’s less than half hour drive from Leeds and so gets quite busy. A strange and impressive, and certainly challenging, rock formation on top of a short hill…

From the top of the crag someone has a superb view over the Yorkshire Moores, green valleys and lush fields, spotted with black and white cows, small box-houses, or even long smokey chimneys of power stations. But to take a photograph from up there is not so easy… unless you know how to talk to the winds… like Tom, who is seen below (the same Tom who has created this blog’s photo header) .

The rock stands through history. It almost freezes time. A remain of natural history, a continuous part of human history. Someone could see several inscriptions of names and years upon its surface, from visitors of the past, not alive now. What did these people feel and think? Was the landscape view the same for them? How free and optimistic did that couple feel, who wrote their names here just one year before the start of the bloodiest World War?

[All photographs by Christos Stavrou © 2007. All rights reserved]