The M62 motorway is a west–east trans-Pennine motorway in northern England, connecting the cities of Liverpool and Hull. The road also forms part of the unsigned Euroroutes E20 (Shannon to Saint Petersburg) and E22 (Holyhead to Ishim). The road is 107 miles (172 km) long; however, for seven miles (11 km), it shares its route with the M60 motorway around Manchester.

The motorway, which was first proposed in the 1930s, and originally conceived as two separate routes, was built in stages between 1971 and 1976, with construction beginning at Pole Moor and finishing in Tarbock. Adjusted for inflation to 2007, the motorway cost approximately £765 million to build. The motorway is relatively busy, with an average daily traffic flow of 100,000 cars in Yorkshire, and has several areas prone to gridlock, in particular, between Leeds and Huddersfield in West Yorkshire.

The road passes the cities of Salford, Manchester, Bradford and Leeds. Between Liverpool and Manchester, and east of Leeds, the terrain of the road is relatively flat, while between Manchester and Leeds, the road crosses the hilly Pennines to its highest point on Saddleworth Moor, which is also the highest point of any motorway in the United Kingdom, at 1,221 feet (372 m) above sea level. (read more . . . )

Dame Judith Olivia Dench, CH, DBE, FRSA, (born 9 December 1934), usually known as Dame Judi Dench, is an Academy Award-, Golden Globe-, Tony-, three-time BAFTA-, and six-time Laurence Olivier Award-winning English actress. Dench was born in York, North Yorkshire, England, the daughter of Eleanora Olave (née Jones), who was Irish and a native of Dublin, and Reginald Arthur Dench, a doctor who met Dench's mother while studying medicine at Trinity College.

Dench's more recent film career has been extremely successful. She successfully garnered six Oscar nominations in nine years for Mrs Brown in 1997; her Oscar-winning turn in Shakespeare in Love in 1998; for Chocolat in 2000; for the lead role of writer Iris Murdoch in Iris in 2001 (with Kate Winslet playing her as a younger woman); for Mrs Henderson Presents (a romanticised history of the Windmill Theatre) in 2005; and for 2006's Notes on a Scandal, a film for which she received critical acclaim, including Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations. In February 2008, she was named as the first official patron of the York Youth Mysteries 2008, a project to allow young people to explore the York Mystery Plays through dance, film-making and circus. (read more . . . )

The Churches Conservation Trust, which was initially known as the Redundant Churches Fund, is a charity whose purpose is to protect historic churches at risk, those that have been made redundant by the Church of England. The Trust was established by the Pastoral Measure of 1968. The legally defined object of the Trust is "the preservation, in the interests of the nation and the Church of England, of churches and parts of churches of historic and archaeological interest or architectural quality vested in the Fund ... together with their contents so vested".

The Trust cares for over 350 churches. The charity is financed partly by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Church Commissioners, but grants from those bodies were frozen in 2001, since when additional funding has come from other sources, including the general public. During the 2016-2017 period, the Trust's income was £9,184,283 and expenditures totaled £9,189,061; 92% of the latter was spent on front line projects. During that year it had 64 employees, and received the support of up to 2,000 volunteers. The charity is run by a board of trustees, who delegate the day-to-day management to a chief executive and his senior management team. (Full article...)

• ... that Fountains Fell, (pictured), a mountain in the Yorkshire Dales, England, is named after Fountains Abbey whose monks grazed sheep there in the 13th century?
• ...that the Rotunda Museum houses one of the foremost collections of Jurassic geology on the Yorkshire Coast?
• ... that All Saints Church, Helmsley, contains two chapels dedicated to different saints?
• ...that an estimated 20 people died after eating peppermint humbugs that were accidentally made with arsenic in the 1858 Bradford sweets poisoning?