“——If she were not here confined thus in me,A shire even of herself might well be said to be.”
“——If she were not here confined thus in me,A shire even of herself might well be said to be.”
Hereabouts, in the olden time, stood a temple dedicated to Thor, and the place was called Thordisa—a name for which the present East Row is a poor exchange. The alteration, so it is said, was made by the workmen on the commencement of the alum manufacture in 1620. The works, now grimy with smoke, are built between the hill-foot and the sea, a short distance beyond the beck.
The story runs that the manufacture of alum was introduced into Yorkshire early in the seventeenth century by Sir Thomas Chaloner, who had travelled in Italy, and there seen the rock-beds from which the Italians extracted alum. Riding one day in the neighbourhood of Guisborough, he noticed that the foliage of the trees resembled in colour that of the leaves in the alum districts abroad; and afterwards he commenced analum-work in the hills near that town, sanctioned by a patent from Charles I. One account says that he smuggled over from the Papal States, concealed in casks, workmen who were acquainted with the manufacture, and was excommunicated by the Pope for this daring breach of his own monopoly. The Sandsend works were established a few years later. Subsequently certain courtiers prevailed on the king to break faith with Sir Thomas, and to give one-half of the patent to a rival, which so exasperated the knight that he became a Roundhead, and one of the most relentless foes of the king. A great monopoly of the alum-works was attempted towards the end of the last century by Sir George Colebroke, who, being an East India director, got the name of Shah Allum. His attempt failed.
My request for permission to view the works was freely granted, and I here repeat my acknowledgments for the favour. The foreman, I was told, took but little pains with visitors who came, and said, “Dear me! How very curious!” and yawned, and wanted to go away at the end of ten minutes; but for any one in earnest to see the operations from beginning to end, he would spare no trouble. Just the very man for me I thought; so leaving my knapsack at the office, I followed the boy who was sent to show me the way to the mine. Up the hill, and across fields for about half a mile, brought us to the edge of a huge gap, which at first sight might have been taken for a stone quarry partially changed into the crater of a volcano. At one side clouds of white sulphureous smoke were rising; within lay great heaps resembling brick rubbish; and heaps of shale, and piles of stony balls, and stacks of brushwood; and while one set of men were busily hacking and hewing the great inner walls, others were loading and hauling off the tramway wagons, others pumping, or going to and fro with wheelbarrows.
There was no proper descent from the side to which we came, and to scramble down three or four great steps, each of twenty feet, with perpendicular fronts, was not easy. However, at last I was able to present to the foreman the scrap of paper which I had brought from the office, and to feel sure that such an honest countenance and bright eye as his betokened a willing temper. Nor was I disappointed, for he at once expressed himself ready to show and explain everything that I might wish to see.
“Let us begin at the beginning,” I said; and he led me to the cliff, where the diggers were at work. The formation reminded me of what I had seen in the quarries at Portland: first a layer of earth, then a hard, worthless kind of stone, named the ‘cap’ by the miners; next a deposit of marlstone and ‘doggerhead,’ making altogether a thickness of about fifty feet; and below this comes the great bed of upper lias, one hundred and fifty feet thick; and this lias is the alum shale. Where freshly exposed, its appearance may be likened to slate soaked in grease: it has a greasy or soapy feel between the fingers, but as it oxidises rapidly on exposure to the air, the general colour of the cliff is brown. Here the shale is not worked below seventy-five feet; for every fathom below that becomes more and more bituminous, and more liable to vitrify when burnt, and will not yield alum. At some works, however, the excavation is continued down to ninety feet. Embedded in the shale, most abundant in the upper twenty-five feet, the workmen find nodules of limestone, the piles of balls I had noticed from above, about the size of a cricket-ball; and of these the well-known Mulgrave cement is made. The Marquis, to whom all the land hereabouts belongs, requires that his lessees shall sell to him all the limestone nodules they find. The supply is not small, judging from the great heap which I saw thrown aside in readiness for carting away. Alum shale prevails in the cliffs for twenty-seven miles along the coast of Yorkshire, in which are found one hundred and fifty kinds of ammonites.
Besides balls of limestone, the shale abounds in fossils. It was in this—the lias—that nearly all the specimens, including the gigantic reptiles of the ancient world which we saw in the Museum at Whitby were found. Every stroke of the pick brings them out; and as the shale is soft and easily worked, they are separated without difficulty. You might collect a cartload in half a day. For a few minutes I felt somewhat like a schoolboy in an orchard, and filled my pockets eagerly with the best that came in my way. But ammonites and mussels, when turned to stone, are very heavy, and before the day was over I had to lighten my load: some I placed where passers-by could see them; then I gave some away at houses by the road, till not more than six remained for a corner of my knapsack. And these were quite enough, considering that I had yet to walk nearly three hundred miles.
After the digging comes the burning. A layer of brushwood is made ready on the ground, and upon this the shale is heaped to the height of forty or fifty feet until a respectable little mountain is formed, comprising three thousand tons, or more. The rear of the mass rests against the precipice, and from narrow ledges and projections in this the men tilt their barrow-loads as the elevation increases. The fire, meanwhile, creeps about below, and soon the heap begins to smoke, sending out white sulphureous fumes in clouds that give it the appearance of a volcano.
Such a heap was smouldering and smoking at the mouth of the great excavation, the sulphate of iron, giving off its acid to the clay, converting it thereby into sulphate of alumina. All round the base, and for a few feet upwards, the fire had done its work, and the mass was cooling; but above the creeping glow was still active. The colour is changed by the burning from brown to light reddish yellow, with a streak of darker red running along all the edges of the fragments; and the progress of combustion might be noted by the differences of colour: in some places pale; then a mottled zone, blending upwards with the sweating patches under the smoke. Commonly the heap burns for three months; hence a good manager takes care so to time his fires that a supply ofmine—as the calcined shale is technically named—is always in readiness. Fifty tons of this burnt shale are required to make one ton of alum.
We turned to the heap which I have mentioned as resembling a mound of brick rubbish at a distance. One-third of it had been wheeled away to the cisterns, exposing the interior, and I could see how the fire had touched every part, and left its traces in the change of colour and the narrow red border round each calcined chip. The pieces lie loosely together, so that on digging away below, the upper part falls of itself. The man who was filling the barrows had hacked out a cavernous hollow; it seemed that a slip might be momentarily expected, for the top overhung threateningly, and yet he continued to hack and dig with apparent unconcern, and replied to the foreman’s caution, “Oh! it won’t come down afore to-morrow. It’ll give warning.”
Now for the watery ordeal. On the sloping ground between the cliffs and the sea, shallow pits or cisterns are sunk, nearly fifty feet long and twenty wide, and so placed, with a bottomsloping from a depth of one foot at one end to two feet at the other, as to communicate easily with one another by pipes and gutters. Whether alum-works shall pay or not, is said to depend in no small degree on the proper arrangement of the pits. Each pit will contain forty wagon-loads of the mine. As soon as it is full, liquor is pumped into it from a deep cistern covered by a shed, and this at the end of three days is drawn off by the tap at the lower end, and when drained the pit is again pumped full and soaked for two days. Yet once more is it pumped full, but with water—producing first, second, and third run, and sometimes a fourth—but the last is the weakest, and is kept to be pumped up as liquor on a fresh pit for first run. It would be poor economy to evaporate so weak a solution. Each pit employs five men.
All this is carried on in the open air, with the sea lashing the shore but a few yards off, and all around the signs of what to a stranger appears but a rough and ready system. And in truth there must be something wasteful in it, for all the alum is never abstracted. After the third or fourth washing, the mine is shovelled from the pits and flung away on the beach, where the sea soon levels it to a uniform slope. In one of the so-called exhausted pits I saw many pieces touched, as it were, by hoar frost, which was nothing but minute crystals of alum formed on the surface, strongly acid to the taste.
The rest of the process was to be seen down at the works, so thither we went; not by the way I came, for the foreman, scrambling up the side of the gap, conducted me along the ledge at the top of the burning heap. He walked through the stifling fumes without annoyance, while on me they produced a painful sense of choking, with an impulse to run. Before we had passed, however, he pushed aside a few of the upper pieces, and showed me the dull glow of the fire beneath. Then we had more ledges along the face of the cliff, and now and then to creep and jump; and we crossed an old digging, which looked ugly with its heaps of waste and half-starved patches of grass. All the way extends a course of long wooden gutters, in which the first-run liquor was flowing in a continuous stream to undergo its final treatment—another trial by fire.
Then into a low, darksome shed, where from one end to the other you see nothing but leaden evaporating pans and cisterns, some steaming, and all containing liquor in differentstates of preparation. That from which the most water has been evaporated—the concentrated solution—has a large cistern to itself, where its tendency to crystallize is assisted by an admixture of liquor containing ammonia in solution, and immediately the alum falls to the bottom in countless crystals. The liquor above them, now become ‘mother liquor,’ or more familiarly ‘mothers,’ is drawn off, the crystals are washed clean in water, are again dissolved, and once more boiled, mixed with gallons of mothers remaining from former boilings. When of the required density, the liquor is run off from the pan to the ‘roching casks’—great butts rather, big as a sugar hogshead, and taller; and in these is left to cool and crystallize after its manner, from eight to ten days, according to the season. The butts are constructed so as to take to pieces easily, and at the right time the hoops are knocked off, the staves removed, and there on the floor stands a great white cask of alum, solid all over, top, bottom, and sides, except in its centre a quantity of liquor which has not crystallized. This having been drawn off by a hole driven through, the mass is then broken to pieces, and is fit for the market; and for the use of dyers, leather-dressers, druggists, tallow-chandlers; for bakers even, and other crafty traders.
Looked at from the outside, there is no beauty in the cask of alum; but as soon as the interior is exposed, then the numberless crystals shooting from every part, glisten again as the light streams in upon them; and you acknowledge that the cunning by which they have been produced from the dull slaty shale is a happy triumph of chemical art—one that will stand a comparison with a recent triumph, the extraction of brilliantly white candles from the great brown peat-bogs of Ireland, or from Rangoon tar. Perhaps some readers will remember the beautiful specimen of alum crystals—an entire half-tun that stood in the nave of the Great Exhibition.
Alum is made near Glasgow from the shale of abandoned coal mines, soaked in water without burning. After the works had been carried on for some years, and the heap of refuse had spread over the neighbourhood to an inconvenient extent, it was found that on burning this waste shale, it would yield a second profitable supply of alum. Moreover, artificial alum is manufactured in considerable quantities from a mixture of clay and sulphuric acid.
In going about the works it was impossible not to be struckby the contrast between the sooty aspect of the roofs, beams, and gangways, and the whiteness of the crystal fringes in the pans, and the snowy patches here and there where the vapour had condensed. And in an outhouse wagon-loads of ‘rough Epsoms’ lay in a great white heap on the black floor. This rough Epsoms, or sulphate of magnesia, is the crystals thrown down by the mother-liquor after a second boiling.
In our goings to and fro, we talked of other things as well as alum; of that other mineral wealth, the ironstone, to which Cleveland owes so important a development of industry within the past fifteen years. The existence of ironstone in the district had long been known; but not till the foreman—jointly with his father—discovered a deposit near Skinningrave, and drew attention to it, was any attempt made to work it. Geologically the deposit is known as clayband ironstone; hence clay will still make known the fame of this corner of Yorkshire, as when the old couplet was current—
“Cleveland in the clay,Carry in two shoon, bring one away.”
“Cleveland in the clay,Carry in two shoon, bring one away.”
If I liked the foreman at first sight, much more did I like him upon acquaintance. He won my esteem as much by his frank and manly bearing, as by his patient attentions and intelligent explanations; and I shook his hand at parting with a sincere hope of having another talk with him some day.
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, andone 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 thecintov; 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 andcountry. 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 therear. 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:
“Hob-hole Hob!My bairn’s gotten t’kin cough:Tak ’t off—tak ’t off!”
“Hob-hole Hob!My bairn’s gotten t’kin cough:Tak ’t off—tak ’t off!”
If Hob refused to be propitiated, they tried another way, and catching a live hairy worm, hung it in a bag from the child’s neck, and as the worm died and wasted away so did the cough. If this failed, a roasted mouse, or a piece of bread-and-butter administered by the hands of a virgin, was infallible; and if the cough remained still obstinate, the child, as a last resort, was passed nine times under the belly of a donkey. To avoid risk of exposure, it was customary to lead the animal to the front of the kitchen fire.
I found a party of jet-diggers at work in the low cliff near the cave, and stayed to watch their proceedings. Eleven weeks had they been labouring, and found nothing. It was astonishing to see what prodigious gaps they had made in that time, and the heap of refuse, which appeared twice as big as all the gaps put together. I thought the barrow-man gave himself too little trouble to wheel the waste out of the way; but he, who knew best, answered, “Bowkers! why should I sweat for nothin’? The sea’ll tak ’t all away the fust gale.”
Judging from what they told me, jet-digging is little, if any, less precarious than gold-digging. Their actual experience was not uncommon; and at other times theywould get as much jet in a week as paid them for six months’ labour. Then, again, after removing tons of superincumbent rock, the bed of jet would be of the hard stony-kind, worth not more than half-a-crown a pound; or a party would toil fruitlessly for weeks, losing heart and hope, and find themselves outwitted at last by another crafty digger, who, scanning the cliff a few yards off with a keen eye, would discover signs, and setting to work, lay bare a stratum of jet in a few days. The best kind is thoroughly bitumenized, of a perfect uniform black, and resembles nothing so much as a tree stem flattened by intense pressure, while subjected to great heat without charring.
If Bay Town be remarkable, much more so is Runswick, for the houses may be said to hang on the abrupt hill-side, as martens’ nests on a wall, among patches of ragwort, brambles, gorse, elders, and bits of brown rock, overtopped by the summit of the cliff. Boats are hauled up on the grass, near the rivulet that frolics down the steep; balks of pine and ends of old ship timbers lie about; clothes hung out to dry flutter in the breeze; and the little whitewashed gables, crowned by thatch or red tiles, gleam in the sunshine. There is no street, nothing but footpaths, and you continually find yourself in one of the little gardens, or at the door of a cottage, while seeking the way through to the heights above. Two public-houses offer very modest entertainment, andThe Shipbetter beer than that at Kilnsea. About the end of the seventeenth century the alum shale, on which the village is built, made a sudden slip, and with it all the houses but one. Since then it has remained stationary; but with a rock so liable to decomposition as alum shale, a site that shall never be moved cannot be hoped for.
The view from the brow in the reverse direction, after you have climbed the rough slope of thorns and brambles above the village, is striking. Kettleness rears its head proudly over the waters; and looking inland from one swelling eminence to another, till stopped by a long bare hill, which in outline resembles the Hog’s-back, your eye completes the circle and rests at last on the picturesque features of the bay beneath. There is no finer cliff scenery on the Yorkshire coast than from Kettleness to Huntcliff Nab.
Then turning my face northwards, I explored the shortest way to Staithes, now on the edge of the cliff, now cuttingacross the fields, and leaving on the left the village of Hinderwell—once, as is said, St. Hilda’s well, from a spring in the churchyard which bore the pious lady’s name. About four miles of rough walking brought me to a bend in the road above a deep ravine, which, patched or fringed with wood towards its upper end, submits its steep flanks to cultivation on approaching the sea. Garden plots, fenced and hedged, there chequer the ground; and even from the hither side you can see how well kept they are, and how productive. Facing the south, and sheltered from the bitter north-easters, they yield crops of fruit and vegetables that would excite admiration anywhere, and win praise for their cultivators. In some of the plots you see men at work with upturned shirt-sleeves, and you can fancy they do their work lovingly in the golden evening light. The ravine makes sharp curves, each wider than the last, and the brook spreads out, with a few feet of level margin in places at which boats are made fast, and you wonder how they got there. Then the slope, with its gardens, elders, and flowers, merges into a craggy cliff, near which an old limekiln comes in with remarkably picturesque effect.
A few yards farther and the road, descending rapidly, brings you in sight of the sea, seemingly shut in between two high bluffs, and at your feet, unseen till close upon it, lies the little fishing-town of Staithes. And a strange town it is! The main street, narrow and painfully ill-paved, bending down to the shore of a small bay; houses showing their backs to the water on one side, on the other hanging thickly on a declivity so steep that many of the roofs touch the ground in the rear: frowsy old houses for the most part, with pantile roofs, or mouldy thatch, from which here and there peep queer little windows. Some of the thatched houses appear as if sunk into the ground, so low are they, and squalid withal. Contrasted with these, the few modern houses appear better than they are; and the draper, with his showy shop, exhibits a model which others, whose gables are beginning to stand at ease, perhaps will be ambitious to follow. Men wearing thick blue Guernsey frocks and sou’-westers come slouching along, burdened with nets or lobster-pots, or other fishing gear; women and girls, short-skirted and some barefooted, go to and from the beck with ‘skeels’ of water on their head, one or two carrying a large washing-tub full, yet talking as they go as if the weight were nothing; and now and then a few sturdyfellows stride past, yellow from head to foot with a thick ochre-like dust. They come from the ironstone diggings beyond Penny Nab—the southern bluff. Imagine, besides, that the whole place smells of fish, and you will have a first impression of Staithes.
The inns, I thought, looked unpromising; but theRoyal Georgeis better than it looks, and if guests are not comfortable the blame can hardly lie with Mrs. Walton, the hostess—a portly, good-humoured dame, who has seen the world, that is, as far as London, and laughs in a way that compels all within hearing to laugh for company. Though the tap-room and parlour be sunk some three feet below the roadway, making you notice, whether or not, the stout ankles of the water-bearers, you will find it very possible to take your ease in your inn.
I was just sauntering out after tea when a couple of negro minstrels, with banjo and tambourine, came down the street, and struck up one of their liveliest songs. Instantly, and as if by magic, the narrow thoroughfare was thronged by a screeching swarm of children, who came running down all the steep alleys, and from nooks and doorways in the queerest places, followed by their fathers and mothers. I stepped up the slope and took a survey of the crowd as they stood grinning with delight at the black melodists. Good-looking faces are rare among the women; but their stature is remarkably erect—the effect probably of carrying burdens on the head. How they chattered!
“Eh! that caps me!” cried one.
“That’s brave music!” said another.
And a third, when Tambourine began his contortions, shrieked, “Eh! looky! looky! he’s nobbut a porriwiggle;” which translated out of Yorkshire into English, means, “nought but a tadpole.” And to see how the weather-beaten old fishermen chuckled and roared with laughter, showing such big white teeth all the while, was not the least amusing part of the exhibition. Such lusty enjoyment I thought betokened an open hand; but when the hat went round the greater number proved themselves as ‘close-neaved,’ to use one of their own words, as misers.
Near the end of the street, and under the shadow of Penny Nab, there is an opening whence you may survey the little bay, or rather cove, which forms the port of Staithes, wellprotected by the bluff above-named, and Colburn Nab on the north. Here theCod and Lobsterpublic-house, with a small quay in front, faces the sea, as if indifferent to consequences, notwithstanding that the inmates are compelled from time to time to decamp suddenly from threatened drowning. Even as I stood there I was fain to button my overcoat against the spray which swept across and sprinkled the windows, for there was a heavy ‘lipper’ on, and huge breakers came tumbling in with thunderous roar. You see piles driven here and there, and heaps of big stones laid for protection; and not without need, you will think, while looking at the backs of the houses huddling close around the margin of the tide. In the month of February, twenty-seven years ago, thirteen houses were swept away at once, and among them the one in which Cook was first apprenticed. Judging from what Staithes is now, it must have been a remarkably primitive and hard-featured place in his day.
Then, crossing over, I threaded the narrow alleys and paths to look at the backs of the houses from the hill-side. You never saw such queer ins and outs, and holes and corners as there are here. Pigstyes, little back yards, sheds, here and there patches of the hill rough with coarse grass and weeds, and everywhere boat-hooks and oars leaning against the walls, and heaps of floats, tarred bladders, lobster-pots and baskets, and nets stretched to dry on the open ground above. If you wished to get from one alley to another without descending the hill, it would not be difficult to take a short cut across the pantiles. Indeed, that seems in some places the only way to extrication from the labyrinth.
I was on my way to look at the cove from the side of Colburn Nab, when a woman, rushing from a house, renewed a screeching quarrel with her opposite neighbour, which had been interrupted by the negro interlude. The other rushed out to meet her, and there followed a clamour of tongues such as I never before heard—each termagant resolute to outscold the other. They stamped, shook their fists and beat the air furiously, made mouths at one another, yelled bitter taunts, and at last came to blows. The struggle was but short, and then the weaker, not having been able to conquer by strength of arm, screamed hoarsely, “Never mind, Bet—never mind, you faggot! I can show a cleaner shimmy than you can.” And, turning up her skirt, sheshowed half a yard of linen, the cleanness of which ought to have made her ashamed of her tongue. A loud laugh followed this sally, and the men, having maintained their principle that “it’s always best to let t’ women foight it out,” straggled away to their lounging-places.
The beck falls from the ravine into the cove at the foot of the Nab, having a level wedge of land between it and the cliff. This was more than half covered by fishing-boats and the carts of dealers, who buy the fish here and sell it in the interior, or convey it to the Tunnel Station for despatch by railway. Two smoke houses for the drying of herrings are built against the cliff, and in one of these a man was preparing for the annual task, and shovelling his coarse-grained salt into tubs. “The coarser the better,” he said, “because it keeps the fish from layin’ too close together.” A fisherman, who seemed well pleased to have some one to talk to, assured me that I was a month too soon: the middle of August was the time to see the place as busy as sand-martens. And with an overpowering smell of fish, he might have added. Six score boats of one kind or another sailed from the cove, and they took a good few of fish. Some boats could carry twenty last, and at times a last of herrings would fetch ten or eleven pounds. In October, ’56, the boats were running down to Scarbro’, when they came all at once into a shoal, and was seven hours a sailin’ through ’em. One boat got twelve lasts in no time, came in on Sunday, cleared ’em out, sailed again, and got back with twelve more lasts on Wednesday. That was good addlings (i. e.earnings). He knowed the crew of one boat who got sixty pound a man that season.
Some liked cobles, and some liked yawls. A coble wanted six men and two boys to work her: a yawl would carry fifty tons, and some were always out a fishin’. Now and then they went out to the Silver Pit, an oyster-bed about twenty-five miles from the coast. He thought the French and Dutch were poachers in the herring season, especially the French. They’d run their nets right across the English nets, and pretend they didn’t know or didn’t understand; and though the screw steamer from Dunkirk kept cruising about to warn ’em not to come over the line, the English fishermen thought ’twas only to spy out where the most fish was, and then let the foreign boats know by signal. Yorkshire can’ta-bear such botherments, and retaliates between whiles by sinking the buoy barrels.
This is an old grievance. In former times, no Dutchmen were permitted to fish without a license from Scarborough Castle, yet they evaded the regulation continually; “for,” to quote the old chronicler, “the English always granted leave for fishing, reserving the honour to themselves, but out of a lazy temper resigning the gain to others.”
He remembered the gale that swallowed the thirteen houses. ’Twas a northerly gale, and that was the only quarter that Staithes had to trouble about. Whenever the wind blew hard from the north, theCod and Lobsterhad to get ready to run. But the easterly gales, which made everything outside run for shelter, never touched the place, and you might row round the port in a skiff when collier ships were carrying away their topmasts in the offing, or drifting helplessly ashore. He saw the thirteen houses washed away, and at the same time a coble carried right over the bridge and left high and dry on the other side.
The mouth of the beck would make a good harbour for cobles were it not for the bar, a great heap of gravel ‘fore-anenst’ us, which, by the combined action of the stream and tide, was kept circling from side to side, and stopping the entrance. It would be all right if somebody would build a jetty.
Of the two hundred and fifty species of fish known to inhabit the rivers and shores of Britain, one hundred and forty have been found in and around Yorkshire.
Returned to my quarters, I preferred a seat in the tap-room to the solitude of the parlour. The hour to “steck up” shops had struck, and a few of the “bettermy” traders had come in for their evening pipe and glass of ale. The landlord, who is a jet-digger, confirmed all that the three men had told me at Runswick: jet-digging was quite a lottery, and not unattended with danger. In some instances a man would let himself half way down the cliff by a rope to begin his work. And the doctor—a talkative gentleman—corroborated the old fisherman’s statements. In an easterly gale the little port was “as smooth as grease,” and, if it were only larger, would be the best harbour on the eastern coast. He, too, remembered the washing away of the thirteen houses, and the consternation thereby created.Would the sea be satisfied with that one mouthful? was a terrible question in the minds of all.
I had heard that among the few things saved from the house in which Cook was apprenticed, was the till from which he stole the shilling; but although I met with persons who thought the relic was still preserved somewhere in the town, not one could say that he had ever seen it. As regards the story of the theft, the popular version is that Cook, after taking the coin, ran away from Staithes. But, according to another version, there was no stealing in the case. Tempted by the sight of a bright new South-Sea Company’s shilling in the till, he took it out, and substituted for it one from his own pocket; and his master, who combined the trades of haberdasher and grocer, was satisfied with the boy’s explanation when the piece was missed. Cook, however, fascinated by the sight of the sea and of ships, took a dislike to the counter, and, before he was fourteen, obtained his discharge, and was learning the rudiments of navigation on board theFreelove, a collier ship, owned by two worthy Quakers of Whitby.
Last Day by the Sea—Boulby—Magnificent Cliffs—Lofthouse and Zachary Moore—The Snake-killer—The Wyvern—Eh! Packman—Skinningrave—Smugglers and Privateers—The Bruce’s Privileges—What the old Chronicler says—Story about a Sea-Man—The Groaning Creek—Huntcliff Nab—Rosebury Topping—Saltburn—Cormorant Shooters—Cunning Seals—Miles of Sands—Marske—A memorable Grave—Redcar—The Estuary of Tees—Asylum Harbour—Recreations for Visitors—William Hutton’s Description—Farewell to the Sea.
It is the morning of our last day by the sea; and a glorious morning it is, with a bright sun, a blue sky, and a cool, brisk breeze, that freshens still as the hours glide on to noon. It is one of those days when merely to breathe, to feel that you are alive, is enjoyment enough; when movement and change of scene exert a charm that grows into exhilaration, and weariness, the envious thief, lags behind, and tries in vain to overtake the willing foot and cheerful heart. In such circumstances it seems to me that from all around the horizon the glowing sunlight streams into one’s very being laden with the delight-fullest influences of all the landscapes.
Though the hill be steep and high by which we leave Staithes, there are gaily painted boats lying on the grass at the top. You might almost believe them to be placed there as indications that the town, now hidden from sight, really exists below. Northwards, the cliffs have a promising look, for they rise to a higher elevation (six hundred and sixty feet) than any we have yet trodden on this side of Flamborough. Again we pass wagon-loads of alum and sulphate, and come to the Boulby alum-works, beyond which a wild heathery tract stretches sharply upwards from the edge of the cliff, and shuts out the inland prospect. Up here the breeze is half a gale, and the sea view is magnificent. More than a hundred vessels of different sizes are in sight, the greater number bowling along to the southward, with every stitch of canvas spread,and so near the shore that you can see plainly the man at the wheel, and the movements of the crew on deck.
By the roadside runs a stream of alum liquor along the wooden trough, and on rounding the bluff, we discover more alum-works on a broad undercliff, with troughs, diggings, and refuse heaps, extending farther than you can see. You may continue along the broken ground below, or mount to the summit by a rude stair chopped in the face of the cliff. The higher the better, I thought, and scrambled up. It is a strange scene that you look down upon: a few lonely cottages, patches of garden, and a chaos of heaps, some grass-grown, with numerous paths winding among them. And now the view opens towards the west, great slopes of fields heaving up as waves one beyond the other, till they blend with the pale blue hill-range in the distance; and glimpses of Hartlepool and Tynemouth can be seen in the north.
The Earl of Zetland is the great proprietor hereabouts: the alum-works are his, and to him belongs the estate at Lofthouse—a village about two miles inland—once owned by the famous Zachary Moore, whose lavish hospitality, and eminent qualities of mind and heart, made him the theme for tongue and pen when Pitt was minister:
“What sober heads hast thou made ache!How many hast thou kept from nodding!How many wise ones for thy sakeHave flown to thee and left off plodding!”
“What sober heads hast thou made ache!How many hast thou kept from nodding!How many wise ones for thy sakeHave flown to thee and left off plodding!”
and who, having spent a great fortune, discovered the reverse side of his friends’ characters, accepted an ensign’s commission, and died at Gibraltar in the prime of his manhood.
And it was near Lofthouse that Sir John Conyers won his name of Snake-killer. A sword and coffin, dug up on the site of an old Benedictine priory, were supposed to have once belonged to the brave knight who “slew that monstrous and poysonous vermine or wyverne, an aske or werme which overthrew and devoured many people in fight; for that the scent of that poison was so strong that no person might abyde it.” A gray stone, standing in a field, still marks the haunt of the worm and place of battle.
Tradition tells, moreover, of a valiant youth, who killed a serpent and rescued an earl’s daughter from the reptile’s cave, and married her; in token whereof Scaw Wood still bears his name.
As I went on, past Street Houses, diverging hither and thither, a woman cried, from a small farm-house, “Eh! packman, d’ye carry beuks?” She wanted a new spelder-beuk[A]for one of her children. We had a brief talk together. She had never been out of Yorkshire, except once across the Tees to Stockton, twenty-two miles distant. That was her longest journey, and the largest town she had ever seen. ’Twas a gay sight; but she thought the ladies in the streets wore too many danglements. She couldn’t a-bear such things as them, for she was one of the audfarrand[B]sort, and liked lasty[C]clothes.
[A]Spelling Book.
[A]Spelling Book.
[B]Old-fashioned.
[B]Old-fashioned.
[C]Lasting.
[C]Lasting.
While talking, she continued her preparations for dinner, and set one of her children to polish the “reckon-crooks.” The “reckon” is the crane in the kitchen fireplace, to which pots and kettles are suspended by the “crooks.” In old times, when a pot was lifted off, the maid was careful to stop the swinging of the crook, because, whenever the reckon-crooks swung the blessed Virgin used to weep.
Skinningrave—a few houses at the mouth of a narrow valley, a brook running briskly to the sea, a coast-guard station on the green shoulder of the southern cliff—makes up a pleasing scene as you descend to the beach. The village gossips can still talk on occasion about the golden age of smugglers, and a certain parish-clerk of the neighbourhood, who used to make the church steeple a hiding-place for his contraband goods. Smuggling hardly pays now on this coast. They can repeat, too, what they heard in their childhood concerning Paul Jones; how that, as at Whitby, the folk kept their money and valuables packed up, ready to start for the interior, watching day and night in great alarm, until at length the privateers did land, and fell to plundering from house to house. But when the fugitives returned they found nothing disturbed except the pantries and larders.
This was one of the places where the Bruce, proudest of the lords of Cleveland, had “free fisheries, plantage, floatage, lagan, jetsom, derelict, and other maritime franchises.” And an industrious explorer, who drew up a report on the district for Sir Thomas Chaloner, in that quaint old style which smacks of true British liberty, gives us a glimpse of Skinningrave morals in his day. The people, he says, with all their fish, were not rich; “for the moste parte, what they have theydrinke; and howsoever they reckon with God, yt is a familiar maner to them to make even with the worlde at night, that pennilesse and carelesse they maye go lightly to their labour on the morrow morninge.” And, relating a strange story, he tells us that about the year 1535, certain fishers of the place captured a sea-man, and kept him “many weekes in an olde house, giving him rawe fish to eate, for all other fare he refused. Instead of voyce he skreaked, and showed himself courteous to such as flocked farre and neare to visit him; faire maydes were wellcomest guests to his harbour, whome he woulde beholde with a very earnest countenaynce, as if his phlegmaticke breaste had been touched with a sparke of love. One day when the good demeanour of this newe gueste had made his hosts secure of his abode with them, he privily stole out of doores, and ere he could be overtaken recovered the sea, whereinto he plunged himself; yet as one that woulde not unmannerly depart without taking of his leave, from the mydle upwardes he raysed his shoulders often above the waves, and makinge signes of acknowledgeing his good entertainment to such as beheld him on the shore, as they interpreted yt. After a pretty while he dived downe, and appeared no more.”
Give me leave, reader, to quote one more passage, in which our narrator notices the phenomenon now known as the calling of the sea. “The little stream here,” he says, “serveth as a trunke or conduite to convey the rumor of the sea into the neighbouring fieldes; for when all wyndes are whiste, and the sea restes unmoved as a standing poole, sometimes there is such a horrible groaninge heard from that creake at the least six myles in the mayne lande, that the fishermen dare not put forth, thoughe thyrste of gaine drive them on, houlding an opinion that the sea, as a greedy beaste raginge for hunger, desyers to be satisfyed with men’s carcases.”
I crossed the beach where noisy rustics were loading carts from the thick beds of tangle, to the opposite cliff, and found a path to the top in a romantic hollow behind the point. Again the height increases, and presently you get a peep at Handale, traceable by its woods; and Freeburgh Hill, which was long taken for a tumulus, appears beyond. After much learned assertion in favour of its artificial formation, the question was settled by opening a sandstone quarry on its side. Still higher, and we are on HuntcliffNab, a precipice of three hundred and sixty feet, backed by broad fields and pastures. Farther, we come to broken ground, and then to a sudden descent by a zigzag path at the Saltburn coast-guard station; and here the noble range of cliffs sinks down to one of the pleasantest valleys of Cleveland—an outlet for little rivers. Pausing here on the brow we see the end of our coast travel, Redcar, and the mouth of the Tees five miles distant, and all between the finest sandy beach washed by the North Sea: level and smooth as a floor. The cliff behind is a mere bank, as along the shore of Holderness, and there is a greater breadth of plain country under our eye than we have seen for some days past.
Among the hills, picturesquely upheaved in the rear of the plain, I recognized the pointed summit of Rosebury Topping; and with almost as much pleasure as if it had been the face of a friend, so many recollections did the sight of the cone awaken of youthful days, and of circumstances that seemed to have left no impression. And therewith came back for a while the gladsome bounding emotions that consort with youth’s inexperience.
Some time elapsed before I could make up my mind to quit the turfy seat on the edge of the cliff, and betake myself to the nether ground. The path zigzags steeply, and would be dangerous in places were it not protected by a handrope and posts. At the public-house below the requisites of a simple dinner can be had, and excellent beer. While I ate, two men were busy casting bullets, and turning them out to cool in the middle of the floor. They were going to shoot cormorants along Huntcliff Nab, where the birds lodge in the clefts and afford good practice for a rifle.
Concerning the Nab, our ancient friend describes it as “full of craggs and steepe rocks, wherein meawes, pidgeons, and sea-fowle breade plentifully; and here the sea castinge up peble-stones maketh the coaste troublesome to passe.” And seals resorted to the rocks about its base, cunning animals, which set a sentry to watch for the approach of men, and dived immediately that the alarm was given. But “the poore women that gather cockles and mussels on the sandes, by often use are in better credyte with them. Therefore, whosoe intends to kill any of them must craftely put on the habyte of a woman, to gayne grounde within the reache of his peece.”
The sands at the mouth of the valley are furrowed and channeled by the streams that here find their outlet; and you will get many a splash in striding across. The view of the valley backed by hills and woods is a temptation, for yonder lie fair prospects, and the obscure ruins of Kilton Castle; but the sea is on the other side, and the sands stretch away invitingly before us. Their breadth, seen near low water, as when I saw them, may be guessed at more than half a mile, and from Saltburn to Redcar, and for four or five miles up the estuary of the Tees they continue, a gentle slope dry and firm, noisy to a horse’s foot, yet something elastic under the tread of a pedestrian. At one time the Redcar races were always held on the broad sands, and every day the visitors to the little town resort to the smooth expanse for their exercise, whether on foot or on wheels. For my part, I ceased to regret leaving the crest of the cliffs, and found a novel sense of enjoyment in walking along the wide-spread shore, where the surface is smooth and unbroken except here and there a solitary pebble, or a shallow pool, or a patch left rough by the ripples. And all the while a thin film, paler than the rest, as if the surface were in motion, is drifting rapidly with the wind, and producing before your eyes, on the margin of the low cliff, some of the phenomena of blown sands.
Smugglers liked this bit of the coast, because of the easy access to the interior; and many a hard fight has here been had between them and the officers of the law in former times, and not without loss of life. The lowlands, too, were liable to inundation. Marske, of which the church has been our landmark nearly all the way from Saltburn, was once a marsh. If we mount the bank here we shall see the marine hotel, and the village, and the mansion of Mr. Pease, who is the railway king of these parts. And there is Marske Hall, dating from the time of Charles the First, which, associated with the names of Fauconberg and Dundas, has become historical. In the churchyard you may see the graves of shipwrecked seamen, and others indicated by a series of family names that will detain you awhile. Here in April, 1779—that fatal year—was buried James Cook, the day-labourer, and father of the illustrious navigator. And truly there seems something appropriate in laying him to rest within hearing of that element on which his son achieved lasting renown for himselfand his country. Providence was kind to the old man, and took him away six weeks after that terrible massacre at Owhyhee, thereby saving his last days from hopeless sorrow.
Numerous are the parties walking, riding, and driving on the sands within a mile of Redcar; but so far as a wayfarer may judge, liveliness is not one of their characteristics. Now, the confused line of houses resolves itself into definite form; and, turning the point, you find the inner margin of the sand loose and heavy, a short stair to facilitate access to the terrace above, all wearing a rough makeshift appearance: the effect, probably, of the drift. There is no harbour; the boats lie far off in the shallow water, where embarkation is by no means convenient. Once arrived at the place, it appeared to me singularly unattractive.
Wide as the estuary looks, its entrance is narrowed by a tongue of sand, Seaton-Snook, similar to the Spurn, but seven miles long, and under water, which stretches out from the Durham side; and on the hither side, off the point where we are standing, you can see the long ridges of lias which are there thrust out, as if to suggest the use that might be made of them. Twenty years ago Mr. Richmond drew up a report on what he names an “Asylum Harbour” at Redcar, showing that at that time forty thousand vessels passed in a year, and that of the wrecks, from 1821 to 1833, four hundred and sixty-two would not have happened had the harbour then existed. “To examine and trace,” he remarks, “during a low spring-ebb, the massive foundations, which seem laid by the cunning hand of Nature to invite that of man to finish what has been so excellently begun, is a most interesting labour. In their present position they form the basis on which it is projected to raise those mounds of stone by whose means, as breakwaters, a safe and extensive harbour will be created, with sufficient space and depth of water for a fleet of line-of-battle ships to be moored with perfect security within their limits, and still leave ample room for merchant vessels.” There is no lack of stone in the neighbourhood; and seeing what has been accomplished at Portland and Holyhead, there should be no lack of money for such a purpose.
Cockles and shrimps abound along the shore: hence visitors may find a little gentle excitement in watching the capture of these multitudinous creatures, or grow enthusiastic over the return of the salmon-fishers with their glistening prey. Andin fine weather there are frequent opportunities for steam-boat trips along the coast. But the charm of the place consists in the broad, flat shore, and, looking back along the way you came, you will find an apt expression in the lines: