THE North York Moors have a stark beauty that we tend to think of as timeless. Yet as the pictures we reproduce today demonstrate, time has moved on here as elsewhere.

The photographs are taken from Knaresborough bookshop owner and local historian Paul Chrystal’s latest book: North York Moors Through Time.

Paul, who lives in York, has been doing lovers of local history proud recently by producing a string of Through Time books: first Knaresborough, then Villages Around York, then York Then And Now, and now this.

As usual, the historic photographs of the North York Moors long ago that he has collected are juxtaposed alongside modern photographs taken by freelance photographer Mark Sunderland of the same scene today, to show just how much – or sometimes how little – the Moors themselves and the towns and villages that huddle on or around them have changed.

Our selection today give just a flavour of the book: a flock of sheep ambling slowly up the road from Beck Hole – one of the moors’ most remote villages – in 1939; the famous “golf balls” up at Fylingdales, now replaced by the somehow even more sinister-looking pyramid; a pony-and-trap making their way through Kilburn in 1903, with the famous White Horse clearly visible in the distance.

It is even more visible in a later 1909 photograph, which shows three men on horseback in the foreground and the White Horse behind them.

The horse was “delivered” in 1857 by John Hodgson, the village schoolmaster and sometime surveyor with the help of 33 men, Paul notes in his caption to the photograph. “The lime needed to paint it weighed six tons.”

The horse was covered in the Second World War so as not to provide a landmark for German planes.

• North York Moors Through Time by Paul Chrystal and Mark Sunderland is published by Amberley, priced £14.99