On their their northern and western flanks the Cleveland Hills have a most imposing and mountainous aspect, although their greatest altitudes do not aspire more than about 1,500 feet.  But they rise so suddenly to their full height out of the flat sea of green country that they often appear as a coast defended by a bold range of mountains.  Roseberry Topping stands out in grim isolation, on its masses of alum rock, like a huge seaworn crag, considerably over 1,000 feet high.  But this strangely menacing peak raises its defiant head over nothing but broad meadows, arable land, and woodlands, and his only warfare is with the lower strata of storm-clouds, which is a convenient thing for the people who live in these parts; for long ago they used the peak as a sign of approaching storms, having reduced the warning to the easily-remembered couplet: 

    ’When Roseberry Topping wears a cap,
     Let Cleveland then beware of a clap.’

In a similar manner the Scarborough folk used Oliver’s Mount, the isolated hill at the back of the town, as a ready-made barometer, for they knew that

  ’When Oliver’s Mount puts on his hat,
   Scarborough town will pay for that.’

It is difficult to decide on the correct spelling of Roseberry Topping, as it is often spelt in the same way as the earldom, and as frequently in old writings it appears as ‘Rosebury.’  Camden, who wrote in Tudor times, called it Ounsberry Topping, which certainly does not help matters.

From the fact that you can see this remarkable peak from almost every point of the compass except south-westwards, it must follow that from the top of the hill there are views in all those directions.  But to see so much of the country at once comes as a surprise to everyone.  Stretching inland towards the backbone of England, there is spread out a huge tract of smiling country, covered with a most complex network of hedges, which gradually melt away into the indefinite blue edge of the world where the hills of Wensleydale rise from the plain.  Looking across the little town of Guisborough, lying near the shelter of the hills, to the broad sweep of the North Sea, this piece of Yorkshire seems so small that one almost expects to see the Cheviots away in the north.  But, beyond the winding Tees and the drifting smoke of the great manufacturing towns on its banks, one must be content with the county of Durham, a huge section of which is plainly visible.  Turning towards the brown moorlands, the cultivation is exchanged for ridge beyond ridge of total desolation—­a huge tract of land in this crowded England where the population for many square miles at a time consists of the inmates of a lonely farm or two in the circumscribed cultivated areas of the dales.