Captain Cook and Roseberry Topping

About trip

Time: 3 Hours Terrain: Strenuous. Description: One cannot help noticing the conical bulk of Roseberry Topping. Cleveland’s Matterhorn. At 1049ft it can claim to the accolade of being a mountain and looks grand and precipitous no matter how it is viewed. A relic of the Ice Age, it hoary head protruded as a nunatak from the surrounding ice. Great Ayton is where Captain Cook went to school; the building although rebuilt in 1975 still stands and has been converted in the Captain Cook Schoolroom Museum. In 1934 a house said to have been owned by Cook’s father and therefore assumed to have direct links with the great navigator, was shipped and rebuilt brick by brick by the Australian government. The original site of the house is marked by an obelisk made of stones from Point Hicks where Cook first made his Australian landfall on 20 April, 1770. According to local authority, Cook’s connection with the house was, at most, only slight for his father is not supposed to have bought it until Cook was a grown man and away at sea most of the time.