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:

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.