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:
"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 they would 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, and _The Ship_
better 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 cutting across 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 sturdy fellows 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 the _Royal George_ is
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, well protected by the bluff above-named,
and Colburn Nab on the north. Here the _Cod and Lobster_ public-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, she showed 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't a-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, the _Cod and
Lobster_ had 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 the _Freelove_, a collier ship, owned
by two worthy Quakers of Whitby.