Roseberry and time

Lo! Roseberry – with stately head erect

Gorgeously gilded by the setting sun

In solemn silence on his misty throne

Sits, towering over all – the landscape’s King

While the bright clouds, as courtiers, stoop and kiss his robe.

SCULPTED by nature and undermined by man, Roseberry Topping stands regally head and shoulders above the Tees Valley, the King of its landscape.

With lofty disdain, its craggy peak peers down on the daily labours of those below who, no bigger than pinheads, scurry at its feet.

The Cleveland Matterhorn even seems to taunt us. From miles away, its shape – that gentle rise leading to a sharp, sky-scraping top – cries out to be conquered, demands that we spend a day clambering its peak.

Once there, it rewards us. A 19th Century writer, John Walker Ord, allowed his pen to run all over the staggering view: “The prospect from the summit combines… Nature in her loveliest and most majestic attire: mountains, moors, rivers, ocean, with a vast and almost absolute infinity of intermediate scenery: towns, villages, halls, castles, steeples, towers and spires – farmhouses, cottages, and simple huts – with forests, woods, groves, cornfields, pastures, hedgerows, green lanes – one of the noblest scenes which it is possible for the mind of man to conceive.”

Roseberry Topping sounds like a sugarysweet synthetic dessert which was whipped up in the Seventies, but it is as much an icon of the North-East as the Angel of the North.

Next week, as befits an icon, it will be the floodlit centrepiece of an exciting arts event called Odin’s Glow.

The event’s name delves into Roseberry’s Viking past 1,000 or so years ago, but its story begins 100 million or so years ago when it was beneath the sea somewhere off Spain.

Sediments in the water settled to the seabed to form layers of rocks: sandstones, siltstones, mudstones, ironstones and shales. The nature of each layer depended upon the contents of the water washing over it.

One layer contains semi-precious jet, the remains of monkey puzzle trees brought down on a current; another layer contains fossils of Jurassic creatures that once lived in the sea.

To cap it all, more than 55 million years ago, a river deposited a hard sandstone – an oolitic cap – on top of the layers.

The waters retreated. The lands moved, tilted and twisted. Ice gouged over and around.

The wind blew. The rains fell.

All about, the fragile sandstones eroded away but, protected by its cap, Roseberry stood proud – an “erosional outlier” sculpted by nature.

Such a prominent feature had a magical, mystical lure for early man. It became the home of hermits, the seat of witches’ terrible powers, the hub of leylines, the setting for legends.

IN the 7th Century, the wife of King Oswald of Northumbria had a premonition that her young prince, Oswy, would drown. So she carried him away, by night and by day, to the highest point in the kingdom where no water could possibly harm him.

Worn out by her long journey, she fell asleep.

The little prince toddled off, and tumbled into a spring. His mother awoke, found his limp, lifeless body and died of a broken heart.

The pair were buried nearby, at Oswy-by-his-mother- lay (Osmotherley today).

Then the Vikings came. They viewed this huge “toppinn” – old Norse for “hilltop” – with awe. It could only be home to Odin, the ruler of the universe, the god of wisdom, war, death, magic, poetry and prophecy.

A tall, bearded fellow, he had only one eye because he had exchanged the other for infinite wisdom.

It was Odin’s berg, or hill. His wife, Freya, was granted a smaller “erosional outlier” near Guisborough: Freebrough Hill.

Just as time eroded the sandstones, so it distorted the word “Odinsberg”.

In the 16th Century, the nearby village of Newton needed to differentiate itself from other new towns in the district. It became Newton- under-Osebury.

Lazy tongues rolled underosebury together, and the toppinn became Roseberry.

Still its magnetism drew people in. They built bonfires on its peak to warn of impending invasion; they dug into its sides for its stones; they visited it just to drink in its splendour.

Around 1750, a summerhouse was built on its lower slopes to enhance the landscape and to provide faint-hearted women with shelter while their brave men struck fearlessly for the summit.

In 1853, the railway brought a new wave of tourists – and industrialists. Joseph Pease, of Darlington, was granted rights to “the mines and seams of ironstone” on Roseberry, but his company was taken to court for failing to pay royalties.

The heyday of ironstone mining was 1880 to 1920, when up to 400 men were employed feeding Middlesbrough’s blast furnaces.

All of these people across uncountable centuries knew Roseberry as a rounded, conicalshaped hill that looked like a volcano.

But in mid-May 1912, a terrible rumble caused all the Tees Valley to look up as a huge cloud of dust obscured the summit.

When it cleared, Roseberry had shrunk by about 6ft – to 1,050ft – and half of its smoothsided cone had tumbled over the edge. A craggy quiff now topped the toppinn.

“Its peak once conveyed the impression of being lifted with an air of pride,” said the Darlington and Stockton Times, “but the effect of the subsidence has been to deprive it of this distinctive characteristic. The head is now obviously bowed down.”

The paper blamed man’s undermining, although it is just as likely that the natural erosion which had sculpted the “erosional outlier” had done the re-design.

“It may be that the hill will in course of time fall further from grace,” warned the paper.

And so it will. One day.

But before then, the King of the landscape, gilded by the setting sun and polished by the passing clouds, will be bathed by Odin’s Glow – an occasion which should live a lifetime in the memories of those who witness it, but will be just the tiniest blip in the millions of years that Roseberry has reigned over the Tees Valley.