THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

The first reports of a band of feral children living in Fryup forest were made by author Gilbert Thorsby in 1926.  Thorsby, a self-styled dandy and adventurer, whose previous works, Among the Blacks and To the Tropics, had been exposed as elaborate fakes, claimed to have tracked down the children and spent some time with them amid the region’s deep caves and near-impenetrable ravines.  Thorsby stirred public interest with a series of newspaper articles, but following his fall from grace, a promised manuscript, Children of the Forest, was rejected, and his reportedly extensive notes on the subject never found.