by the huge ironworks that disfigure so many places in Cleveland.
Loftus and Easington are uninteresting; but a couple of miles after
passing through the latter we dip into a lovely little tree-clad
valley--one of the many green gorges that run down, "between the
heather and the northern sea," with tumbling becks hurrying through
them. We climb out of this one on a stiff gradient, and in another
moment are looking down on Staithes.
At the top of the hill that leads down into Staithes there is a
little railway inn. Here it is advisable to leave the car, for the
hill is exceedingly steep, and there is no place in the tiny fishing
town itself where a car may find shelter. Visitors, in fact, are not
encouraged. If, seeking food, you ring at a door that seems to offer
hope, you are recommended to try elsewhere. Yet the day will surely
come when a large hotel will rise upon the hill, and lodging-houses
will grow up round it, and we shall hear of the "upper" and "lower"
towns, the new town and the old, and Staithes will be spoilt. Meantime
a cup of tea may be had at the railway inn, which, though homely, is
extremely clean.
[Illustration: THE HARBOUR, STAITHES.]
Long ago James Cook, a little shop-boy hungry for the sea, ran away
from Staithes. One marvels that any one could steel his heart to leave
it. But to little James, hitherto occupied in the scaring of crows,
Mr. Sanderson's shop under the hill was merely the gate of a wonderful
new world, and he hardly hesitated before passing through it to his
adventurous life and death; to the heights of Montcalm and the depths
of hitherto unsounded waters, and finally to the knives of the South
Seas. Even here, it is plain, he was dreaming of the South Seas. Some
sailor brought a South Sea shilling to Staithes and Cook, seeing it
in his master's till, was seized by the romance of it and changed it
for a more prosaic coin. The transaction was suspicious in the eyes of
Sanderson, and though he was sorry for his mistake when he understood
it, James indignantly left him.
Staithes is dear to every artist who has ever looked upon its streets
and quays, and indeed to every one who has an eye for pictorial effect.
The deep valley that we crossed a few minutes ago ends here at the sea
in two cliffs, and between them the town is wedged. The narrow paved
street winds down to the shore, where little quays are washed by the
waves, and little cottages cling to the cliff for shelter, and boats
are drawn up on the beach. At the river's mouth, under the other
cliff, hosts of seagulls whirl about the rocks or float upon the water;
but most deplorably the picturesque wooden bridge that has figured
in so many works of art is now replaced by an unsightly iron girder.
Staithes is a place apart. In this deep gully, hidden from land and
sea, one seems to be worlds away from ordinary English life. Even the
people are picturesque; the women and little girls in pink or lilac
sunbonnets and gay aprons, and the men and boys in dark blue knitted
jerseys. Every group of children, every ancient mariner, every pretty
girl in a doorway, is as decorative as a peasant in the chorus of an
operetta.
[Illustration: RUNSWICK BAY.]
This coast is indented with bays. Runswick, only a few miles away, may
be seen by making a short digression from Hinderwell--more correctly
Hilda's Well--where there is a holy well named in honour of the
saintly abbess of Whitby. Runswick Bay is sheltered on every side by
hills. A long low headland sweeps round it on the south, with a strip
of sandy beach following the line of the land, and beyond the sand a
curving line of surf. On the nearer side a cliff protects a cluster of
red-tiled houses, and on the summit of this cliff the car must be left
while we walk down the winding path. It is only from below that the
pretty grouping of the village can be seen. In the tourist season this
bay is rather thickly populated, and as the place cannot accommodate
more than a few of its admirers, the fields near the shore are dotted
with the tents of the resolute. But there must be times when this
lovely haven is a haven of peace.
It is from the hill above Lythe that we first see the Whitby cliff in
the distance, with the abbey standing up against the sky. The coast
and its long line of surf are before us, and on the right are the
trees of Mulgrave Park. The present castle of Mulgrave is modern, but
there are still some ruins to be seen of the old fortress of the Saxon
giant, Wada, and of the Norman Fossards and mediæval Mauleys, and of
the seventeenth-century President of the North, Lord Sheffield. It was
one of the seven Peters of the house of de Malo-Lacu, or Mauley, who
beautified the castle so greatly to his own satisfaction that he called
it Moult Grace. "But because it became a grievance to the neighbours
thereabouts, the people (who have always the right of coining words),
by changing one single letter, called it Moult Grave, by which name it
is everywhere known." Both its grace and its seriousness were wiped
away by the time the Civil War was done.
The hill that leads from Lythe to the coast is nearly a mile long,
and has gradients varying from 1 in 7 to 1 in 12. At the foot of it
is Sandsend, as near to the sea as a place can stand. Here are the
mouths of two little green valleys, each with its own little beck and
each with its own little village. The villages, the old and the new,
Sandsend and New Row, are very tiny indeed, but there is a good hotel
between them, within reach of the salt spray, and houses are being
busily built. The place is about to be fashionable, I think, and indeed
it has charms, with the deep, green sides of the gorge at the back
of it, and the sea foaming at its doors. For the greater part of our
way from Sandsend to Whitby we are on a private road, with a toll of
one shilling. There are several sharp curves upon it, with "Special
Caution" notices, and the sides of the gully at Upgang are very steep.
[Illustration: WHITBY ABBEY.]
Whitby, fifty or a hundred years ago, before the raucous cries of
steam merry-go-rounds disturbed the ghost of Cædmon or grinning Aunt
Sallies stood beside the Abbey Cross, must have been the loveliest town
in England. Even now it is bewitching. The old town and the new are
separated by the long harbour, with its crowd of gaily painted cobles,
its quays, its rows of nets hung out to dry; and so, from the windows
of the Royal Hotel on the one cliff, one can look across the water at
the other cliff, and the old houses closely packed upon the slope,
the red-tiled roofs, the high-pitched gables, the queer passages; and
raised high above these the grassy hilltop, the long, low church, the
sloping graveyard where Mary Linskill lies, the tall grey cross of
Cædmon. Crowning all stands the ruined abbey on its height. A long
flight of steps winds up the steep hillside from the harbour to the
abbey, skirting the churchyard; and from this distance, in the dusk of
evening, the stream of dark figures climbing endlessly might well be
blackrobed pilgrims.
[Illustration: WHITBY HARBOUR.]
The tall gables of Whitby Abbey on its bare and desolate cliff are
known to us in countless pictures. We are prepared for the general
effect of wild stateliness, the turrets against the sky, the wind-swept
height, the whirling seabirds; but the beauty of the architecture is
a surprise to some of us--the slender lancets, the rich triforium and
trefoiled arches, the rose window, and all the wealth of ornament. The
ruins of the tower lie where they fell, a mass of _débris_ overgrown
with grass and weeds. Here under the grey-brown walls, which are
crumbled and bitten by the salt wind like a cliff against which the
spray has dashed for centuries, we may sit and remember the saints and
kings who came to this place when our history was young. It is not of
the actual builders of these arches that we chiefly think. Hundreds of
years before their day a monastery stood here, whose fame has always
overshadowed this later one. This is the story of it:--
In the seventh century King Oswy of Northumbria and King Penda of the
Mercians were at war. In vain Oswy offered conciliatory gifts: Penda
would have none of them. "If that pagan," cried the exasperated Oswy,
"refuses to receive our gifts we will offer them to the Lord, who knows
how to accept them!" So he vowed, if he defeated the "wicked king," to
dedicate his baby daughter to the cloister and give sites for twelve
monasteries. This bleak cliff, then called Streaneshalch, the Bay
of the Lighthouse, was one of the sites he gave when he had killed
Penda, "that destroyer of his neighbours and fomenter of hostility,"
as William of Malmesbury calls him; and on it a monastery was built
by the royal and saintly Abbess Hilda, "whom all that knew her called
Mother, for her singular piety and grace." Here she ruled for many
years, teaching peace and charity, training holy men--St. Wilfrid of
Ripon, St. John of Beverley--and even conquering snakes and birds, it
was said. Important things took place here during her rule. It was here
that the great synod was held concerning the keeping of Easter, when
St. Wilfrid quoted St. Peter and Colman quoted Columba till King Oswy
closed the discussion by saying, "Peter is an officer whom I am not
disposed to contradict ... lest when I come to the doors of the kingdom
of heaven there may be no one to open them to me." And it was here,
somewhere within a stone's throw of this actual spot, that Cædmon, the
lay-brother, the herdsman "who did not learn the art of poetry from man
but from God," stood before St. Hilda in the presence of learned men,
and told his vision and recited the verses that were the first English
poem. "And his song and his verse were so winsome to hear, that his
teachers themselves wrote and learned from his mouth." It was somewhere
close at hand, too, that this earliest of our poets lay down to die in
the infirmary, "conversing pleasantly in a joyful manner." "I am in
charity, my children," he said, "with all the servants of God." Then
he crossed himself, "laid his head on the pillow, and falling into
a slumber, ended his life so in silence." St. Hilda herself, "whose
life was a bright example to all who desired to live well," died and
was buried here, but her bones were afterwards taken to Glastonbury.
The dust of her successor, however--that Princess Elfleda whom Oswy
dedicated to the religious life when he defeated Penda--lies somewhere
very near this spot, within the abbey church itself, with that of the
king her father, and her mother, Queen Eanfled. And down there on the
slope, where the old cross stands, was the graveyard of the monks and
in it the grave of Cædmon.
[Illustration: WHITBY ABBEY. INTERIOR.]
In the ninth century came the sons of Lothbroc the Dane, Hinguar and
Hubba, "men of terrible obstinacy and unheard-of valour." Flying the
invincible standard which their sisters had made with their own hands,
they landed on this coast and utterly destroyed the monastery of
Streaneshalch.
For two hundred years this spot lay desolate. Then Reinfrid the soldier
saw it, and was "pricked to the heart." He became a monk of Evesham,
and after long years came back to Streaneshalch--by that time also
called "Hwiteby"--to carry on the traditions of the past. He began the
work of raising the new abbey on the site of the old; but it was those
who came after him who built that early English chancel, and carved the
lilies of the north transept, and made the decorated window through
which we see the church, and the bluff headlands, and the white teeth
of the North Sea for ever biting at the cliff.
There is no need to return to the town, for we can join the high-road
to Scarborough at a point not far from here. By going a few miles out
of the direct route we may see another of the sheltered bays that make
this coast so beautiful; the bay where long ago, it is said, a fleet
of fishing-boats was always ready to carry Robin Hood and his merry
men to safety. Robin Hood's Butts, on the further side of the bay, are
supposed to have been used as targets for his bowmen by that "most kind
and obliging robber," as a sixteenth-century writer calls him. A long,
steep hill leads down into the little town, which lies on the northern
side of the crescent bay; the old town with its red houses clustered in
the shelter of the cliff, its walls washed by the spray; the new town
higher up the slope. There, below us, is the quay where John Wesley so
often preached. It was there that he received--not without seeing the
humour of it--the sailor's remonstrance against the theory that the
fear of death could only be overcome by the fear of God. The sailor
evidently felt that his reputation was at stake.
[Illustration: WHITBY CHURCH, FROM THE ABBEY.]
This lower and most romantic part of Bay Town is far the most
attractive, but even the upper town is not unpleasing, though it has
several little hotels, and threatens to develop into a watering-place.
There is a road that leads out of the valley on the further side, but
it is extremely bad in every way, and it is practically imperative to
return as we came.
Soon after regaining the high-road we climb slowly up to the moors.
Looking back we can still see the cleft in the hills where Whitby's
red houses are hidden, and the headlands beyond it, and the stately
abbey on the cliff. Before us there is a run so entrancing, a feast
of colour so deeply satisfying, that these moors of Cleveland must
henceforward, I think, be the standard by which we appraise all
moorland runs. The road lies visible in front of us for miles: at times
so straight that the telegraph wires are foreshortened till the posts
are hardly distinguishable one from another; at other times winding
in serpentine curves into the far distance. On each side of us, from
the wheels of the hurrying car to the horizon, stretches the heather.
Here and there is a patch of bracken, now and then a strip of yellow
grass; but it is heather that makes the landscape, that flings its
imperial robes over the hills and nestles under the wayside stones,
that satisfies the eye and rests the heart with its astonishing beauty.
Miles of road fly under us; we glide up and we dart down; now we dip
into a ferny dell and climb out of it again, now we cross a stony beck,
now we pass a plantation of firs; but still the setting is heather,
deep bell-heather and pale ling, purple and crimson and mauve, sweeping
away till the colours are merged in blue. Bluest of all is the sea,
which appears now and then in a triangle of sapphire at the end of a
glen. On the shores of that blue sea, a couple of miles to our left,
is Ravenscar, which takes its name from the raven standard of the sons
of Danish Lothbroc, who landed here when they came to devastate St.
Hilda's abbey. Such at least is the tradition.
[Illustration: WHITBY HARBOUR.]
Gradually, and most reluctantly, we leave these shining heights for the
lower world. The heather gives way to fields; the road is again bounded
by respectable stone walls. We pass Claughton, then run down a steep
hill between trees. Beyond these fir-trees, which rise up like walls on
each side of the road, Scarborough appears--a dim mass of red blurred
with smoke--and its castle lifted high above it on the headland.
"The toune stondith hole on a slaty clife," says Leland, "and shoith
very fair to the se side." How very fair this place must have been one
can easily imagine, when there was nothing here but the picturesque
town of a Tudor day, and the "exceding goodly larg and strong castelle
on a stepe rok," and the "paroche chirch of our Lady joyning almost to
the castelle," and the "3 howsis of freres, grey, blake, and white,"
and the sea-wall made by Richard III., "now yn ruine by the se rage,"
and the "peere whereby socour is made for shippes," which, when Leland
saw it, was "sore decayid." The town was partly walled then, too,
and had two gates, one "meatley good," and one "very base." Only one
or two of all these things are left, and even they are now as sore
decayed as was the pier of Henry VIII.'s time. Yet Scarborough is still
exceeding fair; so fair that it overcomes all one's prejudices against
popular watering-places; fair even in spite of huge hotels and a beach
black with people, and rows of ice-cream stalls, and braying bands,
and hoarse hurdy-gurdies, and all kinds of music. It is built at the
junction of two bays, between which the castle juts out on "a rock of
wonderful height and bigness, inaccessible by reason of steep craggs
almost on every side." Into both of these bays the North Sea sweeps,
even upon the calmest day, in mighty curves of frothing surf. Below the
castle is a little sheltered harbour, where a crowd of fishing-boats
and smacks is protected from the "se rage" by breakwaters. Quite lately
a wide road with an embankment has been built from bay to bay round
the base of the castle promontory. Those who have loved the rough
rocks that once were here feel naturally that this new drive spoils
the beauty of the place. But, after all, Scarborough is not designed
for lovers of wild nature. The mischief was done here long ago. The
new drive is a boon to thousands who have to take their pleasure in
bath-chairs, and in this place of esplanades and lawn-tennis court and
smart clothes a little more artificiality is no great grievance.
[Illustration: ROBIN HOOD'S BAY.]
From very early days this rock has been fortified. In the Heimskringla,
I believe, those who can may read how Harald the Norseman landed near
the strong fortress of Skardaburg, and how he and his men climbed the
hill behind the town and made a mighty bonfire; then, with pitchforks,
flung the burning faggots down among the wooden houses. "There the
Northmen killed many people." The present castle was originally built
by William le Gros, one of the heroes of the Battle of the Standard,
who "increased the natural strength of the place by a very costly
work." Henry III. in his fear of his barons ordered it to be destroyed,
and when its owner demurred came to destroy it himself. When he saw the
costly work, however, he bethought him of another destiny for it. He
made it a little stronger and kept it himself.
[Illustration: MOORS BETWEEN WHITBY AND SCARBOROUGH.]
Scarborough Castle has never yielded except to guile or famine. When
Piers Gaveston, the silly favourite of a silly king, took refuge here
from the barons who were tired of his wit and his insulting nicknames,
it was famine that made him surrender himself and his ill-gotten
goods--crown jewels and all--to Warwick, "the Black Dog," and Pembroke,
"the Jew." The great Douglas, by the English named the "Black" and by
the Scots the "Good," the guardian of the Bruce's heart and the hero
of seventy fights, attacked Scarborough Castle in vain; and more than
two hundred years later Robert Aske and his Pilgrims of Grace, though
they took the town, failed to make any impression whatever upon the
fortress. There was a certain market-day in Mary's reign, however, when
a party of peasants strolled up this castle hill, and without any ado
were allowed to pass with their wares between those round towers which
we still may see, and over the two draw-bridges, and past the keep into
the castle bailey. Perhaps the sentinels were a little surprised at the
number of peasants who came to sell butter and eggs that day, but they
were certainly more surprised when they saw their castle in the hands
of Thomas Stafford and the rest of the smocked rebels. The masquerade
cost Stafford his life, and did his cause no good at all.
Twice again was Scarborough Castle attacked, both times in the Civil
War, both times by the army of the Parliament. It was during the first
of these sieges that the church--the "paroche chirch joyning almost
to the castelle"--lost its chancel. There are still gaunt fragments of
it standing like pillars in the churchyard, as we may see. The choir
was turned into a battery, but received more hurt than it gave before
the castle yielded at last to starvation so terrible that some of the
garrison were carried out in sheets. Then a Parliament-man was put in
as governor, but as he shortly afterwards declared for the king the
siege began again. The Parliament took no more risks. When they had
retaken it, and dealt with it as their manner was, Scarborough Castle
was no longer very redoubtable.
Its state of disrepair was a cause of much discomfort to poor George
Fox a few years later; for this dilapidated building was one of his
many prisons, and he found it far from weather-proof. The home-made
suit of leather that impressed Carlyle so much--"the one continuous
including case"--must have been worn out by this time, I think, for the
wetness of his clothes was one of the great Quaker's most constant
afflictions. When the smoky chimney prompted him to tax the Roman
Catholic governor with sending him to Purgatory he was put into a room
that had no fireplace at all. "Being to the sea-side," he says of it,
"and lying much open, the wind drove in the rain forcibly, so that the
water came over my bed and ran about the room, that I was fain to skim
it up with a platter." Here he received distinguished visitors, and
argued about the Pope's infallibility with as much spirit as ever.
The maimed church that stands below the castle on the slope is not now
so imposing as once it was, but it is still a fine building and has
four chantries. In its shadow lies Anne Brontë. From the road leading
to the castle gate, at a point near the fountain, one may see by
looking over the wall of the churchyard the upright stone that bears
her name. When she was dying, her sister Charlotte, with the desperate
hope of those who despair, brought her to Scarborough, whose bay and
headlands gave her the last pleasure she had. "It made her happy,"
wrote Charlotte, "to see Scarborough and its bay once more.... Our
lodgings are pleasant, as Anne sits at the window she can look down on
the sea."
CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES
SUMMARY OF TOUR IN MID-YORKSHIRE
DISTANCES.
Scarborough
Helmsley, _viâ_ Hackness and Lastingham 41 miles
(Rievaulx and back 6 " )
York, _viâ_ Sheriff Hutton and Kirkham 36 "
--
Total 83 miles
ROADS.
No very serious hills except at Rievaulx.
Surface: main roads excellent; by-roads poor.
III
CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES
It is hard to turn away from the sea so soon. If we find it too hard
to bear we may stay at Scarborough for a couple of nights, and, taking
a short run down the coast, may see Filey, and the white cliffs of
Flamborough, and the beautiful priory church of Bridlington, in a few
hours. Then we can turn westwards with less discontent, especially if
we make a short _détour_ by Scalby, Hackness, and the Forge Valley.