village is a homely-looking place, with two or three inns, a post-office, and little shops and houses furbished up till they look expectant of customers and lodgers. Many a pair of eyes took an observation of me as I passed along the street, and away up the hill, seeking for quarters with an open prospect. Half a mile farther, the ground always rising, and you come to the edge of a clay cliff, and a row of modern houses, and the Marine Hotel in full view of the sea.
Even at the first glance you note the waste of the land. As at Kilnsea, so here. A few miles to the south, between us and Owthorne, stands the village of Aldborough, far to the rear of the site once occupied by its church. The sea washed it away. That church was built by Ulf, a mighty thane, in the reign of Canute. A stone, a relic of the former edifice, bearing an inscription in Anglo-Saxon, which he caused to be cut, is preserved in the wall of the present church. This stone, and Ulf’s horn, still to be seen in York Minster, are among the most venerable antiquities of the county.
Hornsea is a favourite resort of many Yorkshire folk who love quiet; hence a casual traveller is liable to be disappointed of a lodging on the shore. There was, however, a room to spare at the hotel—a top room, from which, later in the evening, I saw miles of ripples twinkling with moonlight, and heard their murmur on the sand through the open window till I fell asleep.
CHAPTER VII
Coast Scenery—A waning Mere, and wasting Cliffs—The Rain and the Sea—Encroachment prevented—Economy of the Hotel—A Start on the Sands—Pleasure of Walking—Cure for a bad Conscience—Phenomena of the Shore—Curious Forms in the Cliffs—Fossil Remains—Strange Boulders—A Villager’s Etymology—Reminiscences of “Bonypart” and Paul Jones—The last House—Chalk and Clay—Bridlington—One of the Gipseys—Paul Jones again—The Sea-Fight—A Reminiscence of Montgomery.
I was out early the next morning for a stroll. The upper margin of the beach, covered only by the highest tides, is loose, heavy sand, strewn with hardened lumps of clay, fatiguing to walk upon; but grows firmer as you approach the water. The wheels of the bathing-machines have broad wooden tires to prevent their sinking. The cliffs are, as we saw near the Spurn, nothing but clay, very irregular in profile and elevation, resembling, for the most part, a great brown bank, varying in height from ten feet to forty. The hotel stands on a rise, which overtops the land on each side and juts out farther, commanding a view for miles, bounded on the north by that far-stretching promontory, Flamborough Head; and to the south by the pale line, where land and water meet the sky. The morning sun touching the many jutting points, while the intervals lay in thin, hazy shadow, imparted something picturesque to the scene, which vanished as the hours drew on, and the stronger light revealed the monotonous colour and unclothed surface of the cliffs. Towards evening the picturesque reappears with the lights falling in the opposite direction.
A short distance south of the hotel, a stream runs from the mere to the sea. The land is low here, so low that unusually high tides have forced their way up the channel of the stream to the lake, and flooded the grounds on both sides; and the effect will be, as Professor Phillips says, the entire drainage of the mere, and production of phenomena similar to those which may be seen on the other parts of the coast of Holderness: a depression in the cliffs exposing a section of deposits such as are only formed under a large surface of standing water. The result is a mere question of time; and if it be true that Hornsea church once stood ten miles from the sea, within the historical period, the scant half-mile, which is now all that separates it from the hungry waves, has no very lengthened term of existence before it. More than a mile in breadth along the whole coast from Bridlington to Spurn has been devoured since the Battle of the Standard was fought.
An old man of eighty who lives in the village says there are no such high tides now as when he was a boy; and if he be not a romancer, the low ground from the sea to the mere must, at least once, have presented the appearance of a great lake. But the wasting process is carried on by other means than the sea. I saw threads of water running down the cliffs, produced by yesterday’s rain, and not without astonishment at the great quantities of mud they deposit at the base, forming in places a narrow viscous stream, creeping in a raised channel across the sand, or confused pasty heaps dotted with pools of liquid ochre. Mr. Coniton, the proprietor of the hotel, told me that he believed the rain had more influence than the sea in causing the waste of land, and he showed me the means he employed to protect his territory from one and the other. To prevent the loss by rain, which he estimates, where no precautions are taken, at a foot a year, he at first sloped his cliff at such an angle that the water runs easily down and with scarcely appreciable mischief. Then, to protect the base, he has driven rows of piles through the sand into the clay beneath, and these, checking the natural drift of the sand to the southward, preserve the under stratum. Where no such barrier exists, the waves in a winter storm sweep all the sand clean off, and lay bare the clay, and tumbling upon it with mighty shocks, sometimes wear it down a foot in the course of a tide. By this lowering of the base, the saturated soil above, deprived of support, topples over, leaving a huge gap, which only facilitates further encroachments; and in the course of a few tides the fallen mass is drifted away to enlarge the shoals in the estuary of the Humber.
Mr. Coniton entered into possession fifteen years ago, and in all that time, so effectual are the safeguards, has lost none of his land. The edge, he says, has not receded, and, to show what might be, he points to his neighbour’s field, which has shrunk away some yards to the rear.
The space between the hotel and the edge of the cliff is laid out as a lawn, which, sheltered by a bank on the north, forms an agreeable outlook and lounging-place, while gravelled paths lead to an easy descent to the sands at each extremity of the premises. The house is well arranged; there is no noise, no slackness in the service; and families may live as privately as in a private residence. The charge for adults is four shillings a day; for young children, half a guinea a week, without stint as to the number of meals: to which must be added the cost of rooms and attendance. The charges to casual guests are as reasonable as could be desired, contrasting favourably in this particular with my experiences at Hull and in certain of the inland towns and villages. Ninepence a day for service and boots is charged in the bill; hence you can depart without being troubled to “remember” anybody. An omnibus arrives every day from Beverley during the season—May to November. The distance is thirteen miles.
The falling tide had left a breadth of comparatively firm sand by the time I was ready to start, and along that I took my way to Bridlington: another stage of thirteen miles. The morning was bounteous in elements of enjoyment: a bright sun, great white clouds sailing high across the blue, a south-westerly breeze, which made the sea playful and murmurous: all gratifying to the desire of a wayfarer’s heart. I could not help pitying those farmers at Beverley, who saw no pleasure in walking. No pleasure in the surest promotion of health and exercise! No pleasure in the steady progressive motion which satisfies our love of change without hindering observation! No pleasure in walking, that strengthens the limbs and invigorates the lungs! No pleasure in arming the sling against the giant! No pleasure in the occasion of cheerful thoughts and manifold suggestions which bring contentment to the heart! Walking is an exercise which in our days might replace, more commonly than it does, the rude out-door recreations of former times; and if but a few of the many hundreds who put on their Sunday clothes to lounge the hours away at the corner of a street, would but take a ten miles’ walk out to the country lanes or breezy moorlands, they would find benefit alike to their manhood and morals. If I remember rightly, it is one of the old Greeks who says that walking will almost cure a bad conscience; and, for my part, I am never so ready to obey the precept of neighbourly love as when my sentiments are harmonized by walks of seven or eight leagues a day.
The sands are of varying consistency. In some places you leave deep footprints; and nowhere is the firmness equal to that we shall find farther north, except on the wet border from which the wave has just retired. Mile after mile it stretches before you, a broad slope of sand, sparely roughened here and there by pebble drifts. At times you see numerous rounded lumps lying about of many sizes, which at a distance resemble sleeping turtles, and on a nearer view prove to be nothing but masses of hardened clay, water-worn, and as full of pebbles as a canon’s pudding is of plums. These are portions of the bottoms of lakes overrun by the sea; stubborn vestiges, which yield but slowly. At times the shortest route takes