This scene will be instantly recognisable to anyone who enjoys strolling beside the River Ouse in central York.

The photo, from Explore York’s digital archive, shows the riverside walk near Skeldergate Bridge.

But what on earth is that cannon - or perhaps, more accurately, field gun - doing there?

The photo was taken in about 1910 by one Walter Scott (no, not the famous author). And clearly, back then, the cannon was a familiar part of the York landscape.

We know a bit about the two Crimean War cannon that once stood guard at York’s Blue Bridge, just a bit further down the Ouse.

They were Russian 36-pounders captured in 1855 at the fall of Sebastopol. They were unveiled on November 5, 1858, by the then Lord Mayor of York John Wood, to commemorate ‘those brave men connected with this city and neighbourhood who fell during the Russian War.’ They stood there until 1941, when they were scrapped as part of the war effort.

Was this cannon also a memorial to the Crimean War? And if so was it, too, scrapped in the 1940s? We’d love to know...