Tag: Flamborough

Sea Mayweed

I’d normally assume that this was scentless mayweed but as it was growing at the top of the sandy beach at the foot of the sea wall at North Beach, Bridlington, I’m going for its near-identical relative, sea mayweed, Tripleurospermum maritimum.

Turnstones

turnstones

As always, at Bridlington last week, I was amazed how tolerant turnstones are of people and dogs walking by just a few yards away.

New Rolltop

Bempton
Bempton Cliffs from the New Rolltop viewing point.

Bridlington may be ‘West Riding by the Sea’, the most traditionally familiar of Yorkshire’s seaside resorts, but with Flamborough Head jutting out at the end of North Bay, you’re soon on a wilder-looking stretch of coast. I was sorry to hear that the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust had reluctantly decided to close their Living Seas Centre at South Landing to all except booked-in parties but we’re glad that RSPB Bempton is so popular.

Selwicks Bay

Selwicks Bay

Dipping back in my A-level field notebook and in those pre-digital days, I found that colour prints could be more useful than slides, as I could stick them in my notebook. Here I’ve indicated a fault in the wave-cut platform of Selwicks Bay, Flamborough Head.

Flints in Chalk

flints
Flints in chalk

Flints are exposed in the chalk of the wave-cut platform south of the fault. Flints like these may have formed when the silica-rich skeletons of sponges and other creatures formed a gel on the seafloor which was drawn down into burrows in the chalk ooze – hence the shape of the nodules.

Buttress of Contorted Chalk

RockWATCH group guided around the features of the bay by geologist Richard Myerscough.

We looked at a buttress of contorted chalk south of the fault. The chalk contorted by the fault has been re-cemented by calcite-rich fluids circulating through the rock and depositing veins of calcite.

Strengthened by this cement the chalk is harder than that surrounding it and it has withstood erosion and formed a buttress.

Contorted Chalk with Calcite Veins

calcite vein

This vein is exposed on the wave-cut platform in front of the buttress.

Tilted layers near at the fault plane
Fault breccia: chalk crushed by movement along the fault
Fault and crush zone, Selwicks Bay, Flamborough Head

Waterton at Flamborough

My drawing of Waterton at Bempton for an article I wrote for ‘Yorkshire Life’ in 1976.

In May 1834 Charles Waterton had himself lowered by rope down the cliffs at Flamborough by two local egg-gatherers:

‘The sea was roaring at the base of this stupendous wall of rocks; thousands and tens of thousands of wild fowl were in an instant on the wing: the kittiwakes and jackdaws rose in circling flight; while most of the guillemots, razorbills, and puffins, left the ledges of the rocks, in a straight and downward line, with a peculiarly quick motion of the pinions, till they plunged into the ocean.’

Charles Waterton, ‘Essays on Natural History’ (1835-1857)
Waterton at Flamborough
Frontispiece of ‘Remarkable Men’, published by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, undated.

My version of this scene was based on this Victorian engraving, artist uncredited except for the initials in the bottom left hand corner, which could be those of the engraver.

Puffins

It was too windy to safely draw on the cliff top on our day trip to Flamborough on Tuesday, so these are puffins from our last month’s visit. A few were sitting together on a steep grassy slope in an inlet overlooking North Landing. When we visited on Tuesday there was just one, sitting tightly on a rocky ledge nearby.

Fossil Sponge from Flamborough

This fossil sponge was collected from the beach at Selwicks Bay, Flamborough Head, on a Rockwatch weekend in the early 1990s.

It was embedded in a fragment of chalk that had fallen from the cliff, so it dates from the Upper Cretaceous Period, 95 to 65 million years ago. I drew it for my 1996 book Yorkshire Rock, A Journey Through Time but since then the chalk that surrounded it has split into shards. The collar of the smaller sponge has disintegrated too.

How I imagine it might have looked, growing in the chalky ooze of the Cretaceous sea bed.

Sponges were common as the age of the dinosaurs drew to a close. They had a sac-like body with a central cavity known as the cloaca.

The nearest species that I can find is Laosciada, a mushroom-shaped lithistid, a kind of demosponge, informally referred to as a calcisponge. It lived in deep water, between 100 and 400 metres.

The skeleton of the collar of this sponge is made up of interlocking spicules, which look like little pyramids in close-up. They’re made of silica which, remineralised, forms the layers of flint found in the chalk.

North Landing

 

IT’S SO WINDY here at North Landing, Flamborough, East Yorkshire, that even the gulls are having difficulty making any progress inland; a gull version of Marcel Marceau’s ‘walking against the wind’ mime. A flock of pigeons is no more successful; they wheel around over the bay and veer off on a less wind-buffeted course.

Flamborough Head marks the border between sea areas Tyne and Humber, pointing out towards Dogger in the centre of the North Sea and German Bight on the far side.

Strong winds tend to bring seabirds in towards this six mile promotory of chalk cliffs, making it a favourite location for ‘seawatching’ but unfortunately today it’s blowing in the wrong direction. If it’s blowing from any direction between north-west and east it can bring gulls and auks, skuas and shearwaters closer to the shore but today it’s blowing from the south-west, tending to keep them out at sea.

You might expect to a lot of white-topped waves in such a strong wind but it seems to have the opposite effect, flattening the crests before they become top heavy. At the foot of the cliffs there’s an effect like beaten brass where gusts bring turbulence down to create temporary patches of smoother sea.

As a change in my watercolour of the cliffs, I started directly with my brush, with no preliminary drawing, painting the shapes of sky, cliff-top and sea separately, as if they were individual pieces of a jigsaw. A contrast to my habitual pen plus wash, which I used in my quick sketch of Howden Minster on our coffee break on the way here this morning.