Yorkshire—Coast and Moorland Scenes

by Gordon Home

When I awoke next morning, I dashed out on to the beach, and commenced to walk rapidly in the direction of Whitby, in the hope that the tide had left some of those black stains still showing. I wanted, also, to examine some of the queer ridges I had so often stepped over, and some of the rivers I had leapt. The rivers were there wide enough in places, but nothing in the way of a ridge or any signs of those inky patches could I discern. Careful examination showed, however, that here and there the smooth shore was covered with sand of a rather reddish hue, quite unworthy of remark in daylight. The foolishness of my apprehensions seems apparent, but nevertheless I urge everyone to choose a moonlit night and a companion of some sort for traversing these three miles after sunset.

The two little becks finding their outlet at East Row and Sandsend are lovely to-day; but their beauty must have been much more apparent before the North-Eastern Railway put their black lattice girder bridges across the mouth of each valley. But now that familiarity with these bridges, which are of the same pattern across every wooded ravine up the coast-line to Redcar, has blunted my impressions, I can think of the picturesqueness of East Row without remembering the railway. It was in this glen, where Lord Normanby's lovely woods make a background for the pretty tiled cottages, the mill, and the old stone bridge, which make up East Row, that the Saxons chose a home for their god Thor. [Since this was written one or two new houses have been allowed to mar the simplicity of the valley.—G. H.] Here they built some rude form of temple, afterwards, it seems, converted into a hermitage. This was how the spot obtained the name Thordisa, a name it retained down to 1620, when the requirements of workmen from the newly-started alum-works at Sandsend led to building operations by the side of the stream. The cottages which arose became known afterwards as East Row.

A very little way inland is the village of Dunsley, which may have been in existence in Roman times, for Ptolemy mentions Dunus Sinus as a bay frequently used by the Romans as a landing-place. The foundations of some ancient building can easily be traced in the rough grass at the village cross-roads, now overlooked by a new stone house. But whatever surprises Dunsley may have in store for those who choose to dig in the likely places, the hamlet need not keep one long, for on either hand there is a choice of breezy moorland or the astonishing beauties of Mulgrave Woods. Before I knew this part of Yorkshire, and had merely read of the woods as a sight to be visited from Whitby, I was prepared for something at least as hackneyed as Hayburn Wyke. I was prepared for direction-boards and artificial helps to the charms of certain aspects of the streams. I certainly never anticipated that I should one day sigh for a direction-board in this forest.

It was on my second visit to the woods that I determined to find a particularly dramatic portion of one of the streams. My first ramble had been in summer. I had been with one who knew the paths well, but now it was late autumn and I was alone. I explored the paths for hours, and traversed long glades ablaze with red and gold. I peered down through the yellow leaves to the rushing streams below, where I could see the great moss-grown boulders choking the narrow channels. But this particular spot had gone. I was almost in despair, when two labourers by great luck happened to come along one of the tracks. With their help I found the place I was searching for, and the result of the time spent there is given in one of the illustrations to this chapter. Go where you will in Yorkshire, you will find no more fascinating woodland scenery than this. From the broken walls and towers of the old Norman castle the views over the ravines on either hand—for the castle stands on a lofty promontory in a sea of foliage—are entrancing; and after seeing the astoundingly brilliant colours with which autumn paints these trees, there is a tendency to find the ordinary woodland commonplace. The narrowest and deepest gorge is hundreds of feet deep in the shale. East Row Beck drops into this canyon in the form of a waterfall at the upper end, and then almost disappears among the enormous rocks strewn along its circumscribed course. The humid, hothouse atmosphere down here encourages the growth of many of the rarer mosses, which entirely cover all but the newly-fallen rocks.

We can leave the woods by a path leading near Lord Normanby's modern castle, and come out on to the road close to Lythe Church, where a great view of sea and land is spread out towards the south. The long curving line of white marks the limits of the tide as far as the entrance to Whitby Harbour. The abbey stands out in its loneliness as of yore, and beyond it are the black-looking, precipitous cliffs ending at Saltwick Nab. Lythe Church, standing in its wind-swept graveyard full of blackened tombstones, need not keep us, for, although its much-modernized exterior is simple and ancient-looking, the interior is devoid of any interest. It is the same tale at nearly every village in this district, and to those who are able to grow enthusiastic in antiquarian matters some parts of the county are disappointing. In East Anglia and the southern counties even the smallest hamlets have often a good church, with a conspicuous tower or spire; but in how many villages in this riding do you find no church at all, as in the case of Staithes and Runswick? Many of the old churches of Yorkshire were in a state of great dilapidation at the beginning of last century, and a great effort having been initiated by the then Archbishop, a fund was instituted to help the various parishes to restore their buildings. It was a period when architecture was at a low ebb, and the desire to sweep away antiquity was certainly strong, for those churches not rebuilt from the ground were so hacked and renovated that their interest and picturesqueness has vanished. The churches at Pickering, Middleton, Lastingham, and Kirkdale must, however, be pointed out as priceless exceptions.

The road drops down a tremendous hill into Sandsend, where they talk of going 'up t' bonk' to Lythe Church. A little chapel of ease in the village accommodates the old and delicate folk, but the youth and the generally able-bodied of Sandsend must climb the hill every Sunday. The beck forms an island in the village, and the old stone cottages, bright with new paint and neatly-trained creepers, stand in their gardens on either side of the valley in the most picturesque fashion.

The walk along the rocky shore to Kettleness is dangerous unless the tide is carefully watched, and the road inland through Lythe village is not particularly interesting, so that one is tempted to use the railway, which cuts right through the intervening high ground by means of two tunnels. The first one is a mile long, and somewhere near the centre has a passage out to the cliffs, so that even if both ends of the tunnel collapsed there would be a way of escape. But this is small comfort when travelling from Kettleness, for the down gradient towards Sandsend is very steep, and in the darkness of the tunnel the train gets up a tremendous speed, bursting into the open just where a precipitous drop into the sea could be most easily accomplished.

The station at Kettleness is on the top of the huge cliffs, and to reach the shore one must climb down a zigzag path. It is a broad and solid pathway until halfway down, where it assumes the character of a goat-track, being a mere treading down of the loose shale of which the enormous cliff is formed. The sliding down of the crumbling rock constantly carries away the path, but a little spade-work soon makes the track firm again. This portion of the cliff has something of a history, for one night in 1829 the inhabitants of many of the cottages originally forming the village of Kettleness were warned of impending danger by subterranean noises. Fearing a subsidence of the cliff, they betook themselves to a small schooner lying in the bay. This wise move had not long been accomplished, when a huge section of the ground occupied by the cottages slid down the great cliff and the next morning there was little to be seen but a sloping mound of lias shale at the foot of the precipice. The villagers recovered some of their property by digging, and some pieces of broken crockery from one of the cottages are still to be seen on the shore near the ferryman's hut, where the path joins the shore.

This sandy beach, lapped by the blue waves of Runswick Bay, is one of the finest spots on the rocky coast-line of Yorkshire. A trickling waterfall drops perpendicularly down the blackish rocks from a considerable height, while above it are the towering cliffs of shale, perfectly bare in one direction, and clothed with grass and bracken in another. At the foot of the rocks a layer of jet appears a few inches above the sand.