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

Knockan Crag

The road heading north from Ullapool, in the North-West Highlands of Scotland, passes beneath a mile-long cliff that dominates the landscape. This is Knockan Crag, which tells a violent story that dates from before the time of the dinosaurs.

The rocks that form this part of the British Isles are extremely old, dating back more than 1,000 million years. They comprise a complex mixture of ancient sedimentary layers and igneous and metamorphic rocks that were laid down during periods of intense volcanic activity.

They are also the result of the collision of ancient continents, and that is what can be seen at Knockan Crag, where older rocks overlie younger ones, which logic suggests should be impossible.

Some 400 million years ago an event known to geologists as the Moine Thrust took place. Deep underground, a layer of schist - a medium-grade metamorphic rock – was thrust over the top of younger quartzite and limestone rocks. Over millions of years, further earth movements and erosion by wind and rain exposed the Thrust to the surface, as can be seen today.

Today, Knockan Crag is a National Nature Reserve with well-marked paths and observation points. As well as being able to look at very old rock formations at close hand, visitors can see rare plants and animals, catch a glimpse of golden eagles wheeling overhead, and look across a vast, barren landscape of lakes, moors and mountains that has seen little change for an unimaginably long period of time.

© John Welford

Staffa

Staffa is a small island off the western coast of Mull, which is a much larger member of the Inner Hebrides of Scotland. The island, which has been uninhabited for centuries, is less than half a mile long and a quarter-mile wide.

There are two main reasons why people visit this island, which is completely devoid of roads or buildings. One is the wildlife, which includes colonies of puffins, fulmars and black-legged kittiwakes, as well as dolphins, grey seals and pilot whales offshore. The other is the geology.

Staffa is entirely the result of volcanic activity about 60 million years ago when vast sheets of lava poured across the region. In places, these cooled very slowly to form massive crystals of basalt that can be seen today as six-sided columns. A noted location is the Giant’s Causeway on the coast of Northern Ireland, and Staffa is another. Here, the columns are topped by a mass of non-columnar basalt that clearly cooled at a much faster rate and did not form crystals.

At the southern tip of Staffa is the feature for which the island is world-famous, namely Fingal’s Cave, where the basalt columns can be seen to best effect, punctured by a sea cave.

Over the centuries Fingal’s Cave has had many distinguished visitors, including Queen Victoria and the composer Felix Mendelssohn, for whom the cave was the inspiration for his “Hebrides Overture”.

Not surprisingly, there are legends about how the island came to be. One is that the giant Torquil MacLeod was on his way home from building the Giant’s Causeway when his sack burst open and some of the rocks he was carrying fell out. Another is that it was the work of Finn McCool, and that the Giant’s Causeway and Staffa are the two ends of the bridge he built so that he could cross over to Scotland to fight a rival giant.

Boat trips from neighbouring islands will take modern visitors past the entrance to Fingal’s Cave and land them at the only available jetty on the east side of the island, if weather conditions permit. From the jetty one can walk to a point close to the cave entrance.

The paths that cross the island are fully exposed to the prevailing winds and there is no shelter should the weather turn bad. The cliffs are generally sheer, so sticking to the paths is always to be advised, especially as this avoids disturbing the wildlife.

On a fine day, visitors are rewarded with splendid views towards the nearby islands, the Scottish mainland and out to sea.

© John Welford

Clovelly, North Devon

Clovelly is a very unusual village on the north coast of Devon, south-west England, between Barnstaple and Hartland Point. 

The village is privately owned and has been carefully preserved so that it looks as close as possible today to the way it looked centuries ago. However, that does not mean that the residents are prevented from having TV aerials, or telephone lines coming to their homes. They must, however, keep their cottages whitewashed and in good repair.

The main feature that sets Clovelly apart from other villages is the fact that its main street is very steep and cobbled, which means that no wheeled vehicles can pass up and down. Goods are transported by donkeys or on wooden sledges that are hauled by hand.

The reason for Clovelly’s existence is that its small harbour is one of the very few safe anchorages along this stretch of coast, which is typified by steep wooded slopes and sheer cliff faces that rise up to 400 feet above the sea. A small fishing community formed around the harbour, and the cottages were originally occupied by the fishermen.

Not much fishing is done here today, but the village has become a tourist attraction in its own right. Visitors must leave their cars at the top of the village and walk down to the harbour – although donkey rides are also possible. Once at the bottom, the only way to get back to one’s car is to climb back up to the top!

As one might expect, Clovelly’s High Street and the harbour area are very popular with tourists, and on sunny days in the height of summer the place can become unpleasantly busy and crowded. A good time to visit Clovelly is therefore out of the tourist season.

© John Welford

The Great Hall and Round Table, Winchester

Winchester Great Hall (Hampshire, England) is just about all that is left of Winchester Castle, built by William the Conqueror in 1087. The hall was extended by King Henry III and has been described as the second finest medieval hall in England – the first being Westminster Hall next door to the Houses of Parliament.

It consists of a double cube of five bays, with aisles supported by shafts of Purbeck marble.

The feature that most people come to see is “King Arthur’s Round Table”, which hangs from the wall at one end. King Arthur presides at the top, with places marked for each of his 24 knights.

However, there is absolutely no reason to believe that this has anything to do with King Arthur. The wood has been dated to the 14^th century, and it would appear that the table was constructed in the hall in 1348.

The decoration is somewhat later, with every chance that it dates from the Tudor period of the early 16^th century. Evidence of this can be seen from the Tudor rose at the heart of the table, and the fact that King Arthur bears a striking resemblance to the young King Henry VIII.

Whether anyone ever connected the table to King Arthur prior to its Tudor decoration is open to speculation. However, it would appear that somebody had the bright idea of doing so in response to a renewed interest in Arthurian legend that was characterized by Thomas Malory’s highly dramatic and imaginative “Morte D’Arthur” which was published in 1485 and printed by William Caxton. Why not link young King Henry to his legendary predecessor?

There can be no doubt that many people have believed down the centuries that this really was the Round Table, and it must therefore be assumed that the trick worked at the time, thus giving Henry a boost that was welcome if wholly undeserved!

© John Welford