Men’s and Women’s Wages—The Signal Tower—The passing Fleet—The Lighthouse—The Inland View—Cliff scenery—Outstretching Reefs—Selwick’s Bay—Down to the Beach—Aspect of the Cliffs—The Matron—Lessons in Pools—Caverns—The King and Queen—Arched Promontories—The North Landing—The Herring-Fishers—Pleasure Parties—Robin Lyth’s Hole—Kirk Hole—View across little Denmark—Speeton—End of the Chalk—Walk to Filey.

A fresh, bright morning succeeded the stormy night, and it was but a few hours old when, after a look at the old Danish tower at the west of the village, I walked across the fields to the lighthouse. A woman trudging in the same direction with a hoe on her shoulder said, after I had asked her a few questions, she wished she were a man, for then she would get nine shillings a week and her meat, instead of one shilling a day and feeding herself, as at present. However, ’twas better than nothing. Presently her daughter came up, a buxom maiden, wearing her bonnet in a way which saved her the affliction of shrugs and the trouble of tying. It was front behind: a fashion which leaves no part of the head exposed, shelters the poll, and looks picturesque withal. It prevails, as I afterwards noticed, among the rustic lasses everywhere.

As I passed the old stone tower near the coast-guard station, the signal-man was busy raising and lowering his flag, for a numerous fleet of coasting-vessels was running by to the southward, each telling its name as it came within signal distance. The man sends a daily list of the names to London for publication, whereby coal-merchants and others hear of cargoes on the way, and calculate the time of their arrival. It is a peculiarity of Flamborough Head, an enlivening one, that ships can keep so close in that the men on their decks are distinctly seen, and their voices heard by one standing on the cliff.

The lighthouse, a circular white tower, eighty-two feet in height, stands on the verge of the cliff, displaying inside and out all that admirable order and cleanliness characteristic of British lighthouses. There is no difficulty in obtaining admittance; you sign your name in a book, and are forthwith conducted up to the lantern by the chief or one of his aids. The light is revolving, alternately white and red, and can be seen at a distance of thirty miles. But here, elevated two hundred and fifty feet above the sea, you feel most interested in the prospect. No “shadowy pomp of woods” arrests the eye looking landwards, but a region bleak and bare in aspect rolling away to the distant wolds, the line of uplands which, sweeping round, approaches the coast about Scarborough. The village with its windmill, and the few farms that are in sight, look naked and comfortless: not an inviting territory for an invader given to the picturesque. But seawards, and along the rugged front of the cliffs, grandeur and variety exert their charm. Here the up-piled chalk flings out a bold perpendicular buttress, solid from base to summit; there the jutting mass is isolated by yawning cracks and chasms, and underneath, as we shall presently see, is fretted into fantastic shapes, pierced through and through, or worn into caverns by the headlong billows. In places a broken slope of rocky hummocks and patches of grass, weeds, and gravel descends, more or less abruptly, to the beach, opening a view of the long weed-blackened reefs that, stretching out from the Head, afford a measure of the amazing encroachments of the sea. Northwards, the bluff crowned by Scarborough Castle, backed by higher elevations, closes the view; to the south you have the low, fading coast of Holderness; and all the while brigs, ships, and schooners are sailing past, more than a hundred in sight, some of them so near that you fancy they will hardly escape the lurking points of the dark reef. One small vessel, the keeper told me, had touched the day before, and lay fast and helpless till, the weather being calm, she floated off by the succeeding tide. You can look down into Selwicks Bay, and see men and boys quarrying chalk, and donkeys laden with heavy panniers of the lumps, toiling painfully up the steep winding road which forms the only approach. The farther horn of the little bay is arched and tunnelled, and, taken with the waterfall plunging down in its rear and the imposing features of the points beyond, invites to further exploration.

The residents at the lighthouse enjoy an abundant supply of water from a spring within their enclosure: their garden produces cabbages and potatoes; the neighbours are friendly, and visitors numerous. Hence life is more cheerful to them than to the amphibious hermits who dwell at the Spurn.

While looking for a practicable descending-place, I noticed many tufts of thrift as thick with flowers as in an antiquated garden where the old favourites are still cherished.

The time—dead low water—being favourable for a stroll on the beach, I scrambled down a rough slope to the south of the lighthouse, and across the rougher beach to the rocks beyond the outmost point, where, turning round, I could view the cliffs in either direction. And a striking scene it is! A wild beach, as rugged with water-worn lumps of chalk as any lover of chaos could desire. Here the cliff jutting proudly, the white patches gleaming brightly where masses of chalk have recently fallen, and the harder portions presenting a smooth, marble-like appearance; there receding into the shade, and terminating in darksome hollows, the mouths of gullies and caverns; and everywhere broken up with buttresses, piers, and columnar projections, the bases of which are garnished with a belt of shelly incrustation, and a broad brown fringe of weed. Above, the white surface is varied by streaks and stains of yellow and green; and seafowl innumerable crowd on all the ledges, or wheel and dart in restless flight, as if proud to show their white wings to the sun.

The reef stretches out a quarter of a mile, as one may guess, worn here and there with channels narrow and deep, along which the water rolls with intermittent rush and roar, reminding the loiterer here in the slumberous July weather of tremendous energies lulled to repose. I walked round the Matron—an isolated pyramid of chalk—and patted her on the back; and strode from one little pool to another, taking an unscientific lesson in natural history while watching the animal and vegetable occupants, and those that seemed to be as much one as the other.

I picked up a fine specimen of the hermit crab, and proved the strength of local attachment: it would not be coaxed from its hermitage—the shell of a whelk. I saw a limpet give its shell half a rotation, then grow tall for an instant, and then shut itself snugly down upon the rock. At times, while I stood quite still, ‘ninnycocks,’ that is, young lobsters, would venture out from their crevices, and have a frolic in their weedy basin; but they would tolerate no intruder, and darted into undiscoverable retreats on my slightest movement. And the animated flowers that displayed their orange and crimson petals at the bottom of the basin were equally mistrustful, and shut themselves up if I did but put my hand in the water, even after they had looked on without winking at the gambols of the ninnycocks.

There are times when ignorance has a charm, and this was one of them. How much happier to sit and watch a crowd of weeds, a very forest in miniature, tenanted by creeping things innumerable, and to have your faculty of wonder excited as well as admiration while observing them in full liberty, than to come prepared to call one an ascidian, another an entomostracan, and so on, and to assign to each its place in the phycological handbook, or the zoological catalogue!

In some of the smallest and deepest caverns which curve as they enter the cliff, you get effects of cross lights from their inner extremity, and see the glistening of the walls, which, worn smooth by the water, appear to be varnished. In all the floor rises more or less rapidly; and in one, a hundred paces deep, the rush and roar of the surge outside comes only as a gentle murmur, and a slow drip-drip from the crevices has an impressive sound there in the gloom where the entrance cannot be seen.

I took advantage of the opportunity, and explored most of the openings, catching sight now and then of belemnites and other curious fossils in the chalk, wading at times knee-deep in weed, and scrambled round the bays on each side of the point, and failed not to salute the venerable King and Queen.

Having rambled about till the rising tide began to cut off the way round the promontories, and the crabbers came in from their raid on the reefs, I climbed the rough slope, and paced away for the North Landing. Beyond Selwicks Bay the cliff is more broken and cut up into romantic coves and bays, with confused landslips here and there, and in places the green turf rushing half way down masks the chalk; and everywhere are thousands of birds, with their ceaseless cry and clang. Isolated masses are numerous; and from one point I could count eight headlands, each pierced by an arch. And here the water, no longer stained with clay, shows green and bright along the base of the cliff, beautifully pellucid where it rolls over a bottom of chalk, contrasting strangely with darksome gulfs and broad beds of weed. And mingling with the cry of birds, there comes from time to time to your ear the noisy report of the guns, or the chant of the fishermen, as rocked on the swell, they sit watching their nets.

The North Landing is a gap similar to the South, but broader, and with an outlet wide enough to be described as a bay. Here I saw some sixty or eighty boats perched from top to bottom of the steep slope; and groups of fishermen with their families, men, women, and children, all busy with preparations for the herring fishery. While some sorted the nets, others lifted in big stones for ballast, or set up the masts, and others pushed their boats down to meet the tide, and all in high good humour; while all about there prevailed a strong fishy smell. And besides the fishermen, there were parties of young men with their guns embarking for a sporting cruise; some armed only with parasols and accompanied by ladies, setting off for a sail round the Head; for this is the chief port of Flamborough, and the North Star, a public-house at the top of the hill, is convenient for victual.

The advance of the tide prevented my seeing Robin Lyth’s Hole, a cavern on the eastern side of the Landing; named, as some say, after a certain smuggler who kept his unlawful merchandise therein; or to commemorate the name of a man who was caught in the cavern by the tide, and saved his life by clinging to the topmost ledge till the water fell. Another cavern is known as the Dovecote; another as Kirk Hole, and of this the tradition runs that it extends far underground to the village churchyard.

I climbed up the western side of the gap, and continued my way along the cliffs, which maintain their elevation. Soon I came to the northern end of the Dike, a height of three hundred feet, and from the top beheld the whole territory of Little Denmark, and the sea all the way round to the lighthouse, and the southern end of the Dike. According to Professor Phillips, this remarkable bank was probably already in existence when the Danes landed: “perhaps earlier than the Anglian invasion,” he says; “perhaps it is a British work, like many other of the entrenchments on these anciently peopled hills.”

A mile farther, and the cliff rises to a height of more than four hundred feet. In some places the bank which encloses the fields is broad enough for a footpath; but you must beware of the landslips. The fences, which are troublesome to climb, project beyond the edge of the cliff to keep the cows, as an old farmer said, “from persevering after the grass and tumbling over.” Then at Speeton the chalk turns inland away from the coast, and the cliff makes a deep hollow curve, chiefly gravel and dark blue clay, abounding in fossils. To avoid the curve, I zigzagged down to the beach; but was presently stopped by a point against which the waves were dashing breast high. I scrambled over it, and was struck by its curious appearance. It seemed to be a high clay buttress, which had fallen perhaps within a few weeks, and was broken up into masses of somewhat regular form, resembling big loaves, and the long grass that had once waved on the surface now looked like dishevelled thatch. It was an interesting example of the way in which the sea commences its ravages.

Farther on the cliffs diminish in height, and are furrowed by numerous streamlets, and the rugged, stony beach changes to smooth, yielding sand. Filey comes in sight, and Filey Brig, a long black bar stretching into the sea from the extreme point of the great bay, half concealed at times by a quivering ridge of foam. Then we pass from the East to the North Riding, and ere long we look up at Filey—a Royal Hotel, a crescent, and rows of handsome houses, coldish of aspect, a terrace protected by a paved slope, and gravelled paths and a stair for easy access to the beach. The terrace commands a view over the bay, and of the cliffs all the way to Flamborough.