Making hay in old Ryedale

In Farndale he picked daffodils for his mother; in Lockton, he was attacked by a gaggle of geese; and in Thornton Dale he went flying over his handlebars and skinned his knees after running over a tree branch and getting a stick through the spokes of his front wheel.

Wonderful boyhood memories of growing up in a timeless rural Ryedale. As a young man, Gordon began to explore the beautiful North York Moors with friends on foot, discovering farms, villages and hamlets, some of which he had never heard of before.

Gordon grew up to become a local historian, and the founder member and honorary curator of the Beck Isle Museum, in Pickering.

The museum has an extensive collection of old photographs of Ryedale, and Gordon has dipped into them to produce two books recently – Ryedale From Old Photographs, and Ryedale Through Time.

Both are real treats – windows on a rural past that is rapidly vanishing.

Among the photographs are many by Sydney Smith, an incomparable photographer who, with his wife Maud and his trusty camera, spent the first half of the 20th century travelling throughout Ryedale.

He left, for posterity, a stunning collection of photographs which record a forgotten way of life.

Today we dip into Ryedale Through Time for the last time. The photographs reproduced here were all taken by Sydney Smith. They are a wonderful tribute both to the man himself, and to the way of life he recorded so vividly.

We hope they give at least a flavour of Ryedale Through Time: a marvellous book that juxtaposes old photographs with new ones taken from a similar perspective, so the reader can see how things have changed – or sometimes how they haven’t.

• Ryedale Through Time is published by Amberley, priced £14.99. The Beck Isle Museum, in Pickering, is open daily from 10am to 5pm until the end of October.

Tom Hardwick, of Vinery Farm, Wrelton, near Pickering, uses a horse-drawn trap to drive a flock of sheep, presumably to market