Scarborough, North Yorkshire

Scarborough in North Yorkshire (35 miles north-east of York) has a good claim to being considered Britain’s first seaside resort, but it has a much older history than that.

There was a settlement here in prehistoric times and the Romans established a signal station here in the 4^th century as part of an early warning system against raiders from across the North Sea.

A massive castle was built on the Roman site in the 12^th century, with a keep 80 feet high, plus outer walls and other towers. The castle faced many sieges in medieval times and was even targeted during World War I when it was shelled from the sea.

The town of Scarborough grew up between the castle cliff and South Bay harbour.

The narrow passageways known as The Bolts were flushed by the sea twice a day during the 12^th and 13^th centuries and thus served as hygienic public lavatories! However, after 1300 a new quay was built and The Bolts became dry alleyways.

The church of St Mary is medieval but suffered serious damage during the Civil War. The Victorian restoration was not to everyone’s taste.  The writer Anne Bronte was buried in the churchyard.

Scarborough became somewhere to visit after a mineral spring was discovered in the 1620s. Local medical “experts” managed to persuade people that the water – despite its foul taste – had powerful medicinal qualities and could cure a whole range of ailments. People who could afford to travel to the town and spend several weeks there did so in considerable numbers and created a social circle of the well-to-do, leading to the building of elegant hotels, assembly rooms and ballrooms.

One innovation that later spread elsewhere was sea bathing.

Scarborough’s popularity grew considerably when the railway reached the town in 1848. Much of modern Scarborough is therefore a Victorian town, with its houses, hotels and terraced gardens. The Grand Hotel, which dominates the sea front on the south side, has 365 rooms on 12 floors.

The church of St Martin on the Hill is notable for its pre-Raphaelite work including stained glass by Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris and Ford Madox Brown. 

Other places worth a visit include Scarborough Art Gallery, housed in a villa built in 1845, and the Wood End Museum of natural history in what was once the home of the Sitwell family (Edith, Osbert and Sacheverel).

The Rotunda Museum of Geology was built in 1829 to the design of William Smith, who is regarded as the “Father of Geology”. His idea was to display fossils and other geological specimens in a gallery built to a spiral pattern so that they could be seen in relation to the geological strata in which they were found.

© John Welford

Stac Pollaidh, Scotland

Stac Pollaidh (which is often anglicized as Stac Polly) is a craggy outcrop that rises above a desolate moor in the far northwest of Scotland (to the north of Ullapool). Bristling with rock pinnacles, it has been likened to a gigantic porcupine.

The mountain is composed of rocks that are extremely old, and those at its base are older still. It is composed of Torridonian sandstone that dates from around 1,000 million years ago – long before dinosaurs roamed the planet. 

The Lewisian gneiss that forms the plateau is one of the most ancient rocks known in the world, being some 2,800 million years old.

Very few people live round here. There are only about 12,000 inhabitants in an area of around a million acres in extent. The population was once higher, although life round here can never have been easy. The Highland Clearances of the 18^th/19^th centuries turned thousands of people off the land to make room for deer and sheep.

Despite the remoteness of this region, Stac Pollaidh is not difficult to reach and climb, although some of the pinnacles are only accessible to experienced and properly equipped rock climbers. The views from the higher slopes are magnificent and extensive – on a fine day, that is!

Stac Pollaidh is one of several sandstone remnants in this area, although the others look somewhat different because they retained their caps of quartzite, which give them a rounded appearance. Because Stac Pollaidh’s cap has been eroded away, the sandstone has itself been subject to erosion that has produced its jagged skyline.

The area has been designated a national nature reserve that includes wild moorland, scree slope and bog. The Inverpolly Nature Reserve is the second largest in Great Britain (after the Cairngorms). 

Plants to be found here at higher levels include dwarf azalea, starry saxifrage, cowberry, and alpine forms of club-moss, lichen and fern. Lower down one can find sea pinks, rock speedwell and alpine hawkweed.

Animal life includes red and roe deer and wildcats. Bird life includes golden eagles and – in the lochs - black-throated divers. 

This is a truly wild landscape that cannot fail to impress.

© John Welford

The Priest's House, Easton on the Hill

This two-storey stone building dates from around 1495. It is in the village of Easton on the Hill, which is in the top north-east corner of Northamptonshire. 

The rector of Easton at that time was Thomas Stokes, who came from a very wealthy family. In his will he left money to pay for the services of a chantry priest, the idea being that the priest would have the sole duty of saying masses and praying for the soul of the departed so that he would not have to spend too much time in Purgatory before being admitted to Heaven. 

The Priest’s House was the home of the chantry priest, who was appointed when Thomas Stokes died in 1495. After the custom was abandoned in 1545 at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries, the house was used by village priests until a new rectory was built in 1698.

Later uses of the building included a school and a farm building for the housing of livestock. In 1868 alterations were made so that hay could be stored in the upper room and passed through a trapdoor to the animals below.

The Priest’s House is now in the care of the National Trust and is open to visitors free of charge – as long as you can find the man with the key!

The two rooms, upstairs and downstairs, are a local museum devoted to local affairs, particularly the ironstone and slate industries that were once the mainstay of the local economy. The area played an important role during World War Two as the location of airstrips that were used by the Royal Air Force for missions against Nazi Germany. This activity is also featured in the displays to be seen here.

A question that must strike many visitors is how the exhibits on the upper floor got where they are, given that the two rooms are only connected via a narrow spiral staircase. Presumably the 19^th century trapdoor was brought into play for this purpose!

© John Welford