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Fishing huts at Port Mulgrave, North Yorkshire

Port Mulgrave was a small harbour serving ironstone mines in North Yorkshire. Once the railways reached the mines, exporting the ironstone by sea was no longer necessary and the harbour was abandoned after the First World War. Since then it has been used by local people’s small fishing boats which are dragged ashore on the beach well above the high water mark. There are a couple of dozen fishing huts used for storage and overnight stays, and until recently as a main residence. The huts are self-built improvised structures, mostly made from driftwood and reclaimed materials. Not as substantial as the similar site at Braystones in Cumbria. The old mine and harbour features are gradually being eroded by the North Sea storms and access has recently become much more difficult after the metal staircase down from the Cleveland Way was rendered unusable.

I’ve uploaded some photos from Geograph and then linked to newspaper stories and blogs with more information about the site.

Yorkshire Live story from June 2024, with more photos:

The shanty town few people know about with stunning beach and breathtaking views
The former ironstone exporting port in North Yorkshire has a unique collection of fisherman’s huts down on the shore

Julia Garner’s blog post about Port Mulgrave:

Port Mulgrave beach huts.
What an eclectic mixture of properties back the beach at Port Mulgrave! Check out my previous posts though for access!

Finally a video walk around of the site from East Coast Beachcombing:

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Tramcar hut at Ironbridge

One of ways people used to make huts for recreational use was to take a wooden railway wagon or carriage and rework it into a small building. Some of these still survive at hutting sites. Sometimes the same approach was used to make other buildings, and at the Blists Hill Victorian Town museum in Ironbridge is a tramcar that was turned into a Sunday school!

(I took the above photograph during our holiday at Century Wood this week.)

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A walk to Walden Pond

In this video from May 2022, I walk from the busy crossroads into Walden Woods and to the site of Thoreau’s cabin, where he lived for 2 years, 2 months, and 2 days from July 1845. I add a stone brought from Century Wood to the cairn by the cabin site. I then look at the wildlife and views of the pond and the forest. 

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The film “Land”

I went to the cinema yesterday for the first time since 2019, to see “Land”, starring and directed by Robin Wright, in which her character, Edee, moves to a remote cabin in Wyoming following a tragedy in her former life. I think a lot of the reviewers have missed the point and in this post I dig deeper to explain how it worked for me, and how that’s based on the whole idea of living in a cabin in the wilderness.

I hadn’t planned to see the film but I was in Manchester for the first time this year and I had enough spare for its 90 minutes. I went through Victoria Station on my eventual way to the Vue cinema at the Printworks. The flowers and other tributes from the recent anniversary of the Manchester Arena bombing in May 2017 were still there, and I still had that grief at the back of my mind when I saw the film, in which grief is a major theme.

Memorials to the victims of the Manchester Arena bombing in May 2017

The film is an emotional journey set against the dramatic mountain landscape. The elements of suspense are in trying to understand the characters’ back stories as the clues accumulate. This post contains spoilers about Edee’s backstory. The further you read, the more spoilers. But there are no major plot spoilers here which are not revealed in the film’s own publicity, including the trailer.

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Spring at the log cabin video

I spent two nights of the Easter weekend at our off grid log cabin at Century Wood. I’ve made this video about staying there, and I also talk through the basic 12V electric system, the kitchen sink and drain, and how I use the wood stove.

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The North Pond Hermit

Last week I read Michael Finkel’s book about Christopher Thomas Knight, the “North Pond Hermit”, who lived alone in the woods of Maine for 27 years from 1986 with only two incidents of human contact. I wasn’t so much interested in Knight’s way of life, but rather the description of the community of cabin owners that he stole food and basic supplies from.

I’ve found it very difficult to find photos that I can use of Knight or his ramshackle encampment of tents and tarpaulins hidden amongst a cluster of huge boulders in the woods. However, this short video from a news report shows the state game warden and the state trooper who caught and then arrested Knight, and his encampment.

The Michael Finkel also has a page of photos on his website about his book about Knight, “The Stranger in the Woods“.

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Log cabins on YouTube

The cabin-in-the-woods is part of the folklore of North America and it’s not surprising that there are a lot of videos about them on YouTube. Some are quite conventional second homes that just happen to be built of wood, but at the other extreme are basic log cabins built by the owners using the surrounding forest. This post is a collection of some of those YouTube channels that are worth looking at, and that might be relevant to woodland hutting in Britain.

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“Henry builds a cabin” by D.B. Johnson

“Henry builds a cabin” shows a bear called Henry building a cabin in the woods near a lake, just like the house that Henry David Thoreau built by Walden Pond in 1845. We meet the bear’s friends (Bronson) Alcott, (Ralph Waldo) Emerson, and Miss Lydia (Emerson), and Henry explains to each of them how his cabin isn’t too small because he has the woods to enjoy too. This lovely book has become a family favourite that we now read together in our own cabin 🙂

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Woodland Hutting

Once upon a time, people across Britain had the freedom to build a weekend hut or a cabin-in-the-woods on land they rented or bought for a few pounds. All that changed in 1948 with the Town and Country Planning Acts. In Scotland, there is a growing movement to get some of that freedom back. How can we do the same in England and Wales? I think the first step is to start with cabins-in-the-woods and “Woodland Hutting”.

“Woodland Hutting” involves a hut or cabin-in-the-woods which satisfies the following conditions:

  • It is built within plantation woodland or in accordance with a management plan which protects an Ancient Woodland site.
  • It is not visible from outside the wood, or if in new woodland, it will not be visible when the wood matures.
  • It is largely built of renewable materials, especially timber.
  • It has no formal foundations and can be removed leaving little or no trace.
  • It has an internal floor area of about 30m2 or less.
  • It is owned and primarily occupied by the same individual or family, whose primary residence is elsewhere.

These conditions are designed to address concerns about ecological damage and impact on the local environment and neighbours.

Read more on the Hutters.uk page about Woodland Hutting, which covers legal routes for increased hutting, finding land, and next steps.