Have a good St Valentine’s Day, all. Having someone you care about to share your life with is, all things considered, a wonderful and precious thing.
(The grey seals above live in Yorkshire)
Archive for the ‘Yorkshire’ Category
Feb 14th Leave a comment
Flamborough Head lighthouses Leave a comment
There are two lighthouses at Flamborough Head in Yorkshire. One dates from the nineteenth century, the other from the seventeenth.
Sea Defences at Robin Hood’s Bay Leave a comment
Epic sea defences at Robin Hood’s Bay in Yorkshire, built at enormous expense in the 1970s.
They will fail.
Paddles with an Anas Acuta 1 comment
One consequence of the explosion in sea kayaking blogs, is that it’s now customary to introduce yourself to paddlers you meet out on the water by enchanging blog titles. In the unlikely event that the paddler you’ve met turns out not to possess a blog, then social etiquette dictates that you should paddle on past without further communication.
Pics taken below Whitby lighthouse.
Clapotis Leave a comment
Watching the surf crash into the sea wall at Scarborough Spa. ‘Clapotis‘ is a word to describe the confused seas which result when waves refract back upon themselves.
Scarborough has a claim to be the earliest seaside resort. A natural spring ‘discovered’ flowing from the cliffs at the pictured spot in 1626 was promoted over subsequent decades as able to cure illnesses. Rather disappointingly, the spring still survives, but is permanently closed due to vandalism.
Filey Lifeboat Leave a comment
Last week we happened to be sitting in the van on Filey seafront eating bacon sarnies for brekkie, when the Filey all-weather lifeboat launched for an exercise. The sea retreats someway offshore at low tide on this part of the Yorkshire coast, so a tractor is used to tow the boat into deep water.
As always with the RNLI, it was a pleasure to watch them at work.
Flamborough Head Gannet Leave a comment
This fellow at Flamborough Head in Yorkshire is easily the best six foot tall wooden carved gannet that we’ve ever seen.
Sadly, he was alone; we were too late in the season for the 1000s of gannets who usually live nearby at Bempton Cliffs.
Cliff Railways Leave a comment
These images show two of Scarborough’s cliff railways, both beside the Grand Hotel; one is still in use, the other is not.
Cliff railways were developed both as a means of making the beach accessible at clifftop resorts, and as a tourist draw in themselves. Each consisted of two cars which counterweighted one another, sometimes utilising water-filled counterweights. This novel means of accessing the beach was first adopted at Scarborough in 1876, built specifically to serve the Prince of Wales Hotel. Scarborough eventually had four; a total of 25 were built across the country between 1876 and 1935.
Scarborough Harbour 2 comments
Not such a bad place…
Please do not touch the glass Leave a comment
I guess that this fellow can’t read…
North York Moors Coast Leave a comment
We’ve just made it home from a splendid week on the coast of the North York Moors National Park. Heather had been here to walk the Coast to Coast Path, but I’d hardly been to the area before. Which is a shame. Because it is absolutely stunning.
Whitby Abbey Leave a comment
Whitby Abbey overlooks the North Sea from atop cliffs. Whitby harbour is directly below, down a steep flight of 199 steps. Whitby was the key setting for the novel Dracula, chosen largely because of the atmospheric abbey. This gothic theme has become self-perpetuating; Whitby is now a mecca for modern Goths, with various annual get-togethers and horror film festivals.
The Abbey was built on the location of an early Christian monastery,which was the site of the Synod of Whiby in AD 664. This was basically a conference where it was ‘agreed’ that the Celtic Christian Church would now embrace the practices, beliefs and authority of the larger and more formalised Roman Church. However, such political machinations took place long before the current Abbey was built, and the archaeological traces of St Hilda’s original monastery have mostly eroded into the sea.
I’ve been researching and writing about the significance of the coast in early Christianity. Whilst it’s an interesting topic, as an Historian it’s incredibly frustrating to research. As with Whitby, the physical evidence is very limited and worse, almost everything in print seems to be written by people who actually believe in miracles and are unable to discern half-baked fairy stories from actual Historical evidence. Rant over.
*Postscript: in the hour since writing that draft above, I stumbled on something by landscape historian W. G. Hoskins that sums up the problem rather well;
“W.G. Hoskins – ‘Whoever approaches the Celtic Saints walks on the edge of a quicksand”
