A Month in Yorkshire

by Walter White

Mulgrave Park—Giant Wade—Ubba’s Landing-place—The Boggle-boggarts—The Fairy’s Chase—Superstitions—The Knight of the Evil Lake—Lythe—St. Oswald’s Church—Goldsborough—Kettleness—Rugged Cliffs and Beach—Runswick Bay—Hob-Hole—Cure for Whooping-cough—Jet Diggers—Runswick—Hinderwell—Horticultural Ravine—Staithes—A curious Fishing-town—The Black Minstrels—A close-neaved Crowd—The Cod and Lobster—Houses washed away—Queer back Premises—The Termagants’ Duel—Fisherman’s Talk—Cobles and Yawls—Dutch and French Poachers—Tap-room Talk—Reminiscences of Captain Cook.

I shouldered my knapsack, and paced once more up the hill: a long and toilsome hill it is; but you can beguile the way nevertheless. Behind the hedge on the left stretches Mulgrave Park, hill and dale, and running brooks, and woods wherein the walks and drives extend for twenty miles. I had procured a ticket of admission at Whitby; but having spent so much time over the alum, had none to spare for the park, with its Gothic mansion, groves and gardens, and fragment of an old castle on an eminence surrounded by woods; and the Hermitage, the favourite resort of picnic parties. According to hoary legend, the original founder of the castle was giant Wade, or Wada, a personage still talked of by the country-folk, who give his name to the Roman Causeway which runs from Dunsley to Malton, and point out certain large stones at two villages a few miles apart as Wade’s Graves. It was in Dunsley Bay, down there on the right, that Ubba landed with his sea-rovers in 867, and the hill on which he planted his standard is still called Ravenhill.

And here were the haunts of the boggle-boggarts—a Yorkshire fairy tribe. At Kettleness, whither we shall come by and by, they used to wash their linen in a certain spring, named Claymore Well, and the noise of their ‘bittle’ was heard more than two miles off. Jeanie, one of these fairies, made her abode in the Mulgrave woods, and one day a young farmer, curious to see a bogle, mounted his horse, rode up to her bower, and called her by name. She obeyed the call, but in a towering rage at the intrusion, and the adventurer, in terror, turned and fled, with the nimble sprite close at his heels. At length, just as he was leaping a brook, she aimed a stroke with her wand and cut his horse in two; but the fugitive kept his seat, and fell with the foremost half on the farther bank, and the weird creature, stopped by the running water, witnessed his escape with an evil eye.

We may remember, too, that Cleveland, remote from great thoroughfares, was a nursery of superstitions long after the owlish notions died out from other places. Had your grandmother been born here she would have been able to tell you that to wear a ring cut from old, long-buried coffin-lead, would cure the cramp; that the water from the leaden roof of a church, sprinkled on the skin, was a specific for sundry diseases—most efficacious if taken from over the chancel. Biscuits baked on Good Friday would keep good all the year, and a person ill with flux had only to swallow one grated in milk, or brandy-and-water, and recovery was certain. Clothes hung out to dry on Good Friday would, when taken down, be found spotted with blood. To fling the shirt or shift of a sick person into a spring, was a sure way to foreknow the issue of the malady: if it floated—life; if it sank—death. And when the patient was convalescent, a small piece was torn from the garment and hung on the bushes near the spring; and springs thus venerated were called Rag-wells.

The lands of Mulgrave were given by King John to Peter de Malolacu as a reward for crime—helping in the cruel murder of Prince Arthur. By this Knight of the Evil-lake—evil heart, rather—the castle was rebuilt; and, pleased with the beauty of the sight, he named it Moult Grace; but because that he was hard-hearted and an oppressor, the people changed the c into v; whence, says tradition, the origin of the present name.

On the crown of the hill we come to Lythe, which—to borrow a term from Lord Carlisle—is a “well-conditioned” village, adorned with honeysuckle and little flower-gardens. The elevation, five hundred feet, affords an agreeable view of Whitby Abbey, and part of the intervening coast and country. The church is dedicated to St. Oswald, the royal Northumbrian martyr; and inside you may see a monument to Constantine John, Baron Mulgrave, who as Captain Phipps sailed to Spitzbergen in 1773, on one of those arctic explorations to which, from first to last, England owes no small share of her naval renown.

Here I struck into a lane for Goldsborough, the village which claims one of Wade’s graves; and along byeways down to the shore at Kettleness—a grand cliff nearly four hundred feet high, so named from hollows or ‘kettles’ in the ground near it.

Here, descending the steep road to the beach, you pass more alum-works, backed by the precipitous crags. Everywhere you see signs of fallen rocks and landslips. In a slip which happened in 1830, the labourers’ cottages were carried down and buried; but with sufficient warning to enable the inmates to escape. Once the cliff took fire and burned for two years. From this point the way along the shore is wilder and rougher—more bestrewn with slabs and boulders than any we have yet seen. Up and down, in and out; now close under the cliff; now taking to the weedy rocks to avoid an overhanging mass that seems about to fall. Here and there jet-diggers and quarrymen are busy high above your head, and make the passage more difficult by their heaps of rubbish. Among the boulders you will notice some perfectly globular in form, as if finished in a lathe. One that I stooped to examine was a singular specimen of Nature’s handiwork. It proved to be a hemisphere only, smooth and highly polished, so exact a round on one side, so true a flat on the other, that no artificer could have produced better. In appearance it resembled quartz. I longed to bring it away; but it was about the bigness of half an ordinary Dutch cheese, and weighed some five or six pounds. All I could do was to leave it in a safe spot for some after-coming geologist.

Having passed the bluff, we see to the bottom of Runswick Bay, and the village of Runswick clustered on the farther heights. A harbour of refuge is much wanted on this shelterless coast, and some engineers show this to be the best place for it; others contend for Redcar, at the mouth of the Tees. Here, again, the cliff diminishes in elevation, and the ground slopes upwards to higher land in the rear. About the middle of the bay is Hob-Hole, a well-known cave, once more than a hundred feet deep, but now shortened by two-thirds, and in imminent danger of complete destruction by jet-diggers. Cattle used to come down from the pastures and betake themselves to its cool recesses in hot summer days, and if caught by the tide instinctively sought the inner end, which, as the floor rose by a gentle acclivity, was above the reach of the water. I could scarcely help fancying that the half-dozen cows standing up to their knees in a salt-water pool were ruminating sadly over their lost resort.

What would the grandmothers say if they could return and see the spoiling of Hob’s dwelling-place: Hob, whose aid they used to invoke for the cure of whooping-cough? Standing at the entrance of the cave with the sick child in their arms, they addressed him thus: