Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
A distant cousin of mine who lived in Thirsk told me that when she was a young child her guinea pig died. In tears she took it, in its cage, to Alf White – a.k.a. James Herriot – the local vet.
“Can you do anything for him?”
It didn’t work out like it does in the TV series:
“No sorry, even I can’t help him!”
Grape Lane, Whitby, has no connection that I know to James Herriot but another James, later Captain Cook, was apprenticed there in 1746.
Sketches from Whitby and from ‘Yorkshire’s Food Capital’, Malton. Tone added in Photoshop.
As we walked along the beach between Sandsend and Whitby on Friday morning, I spotted this ammonite fossil embedded in the boulder clay cliff. The closely spaced ribs are almost straight, so that it reminded me of a section of reinforced hosepipe.
Dactylioceras was a slow swimming ammonite from the Early Jurassic. This looks like a fragment of the shell of Dactylioceras tenuicostatum, a common fossil found in the Whitby Mudstone Formation at locations such as Port Mulgrave.
The hollow chamber inside the shell has been filled with calcite crystals.
Hildoceras, also from the Early Jurassic has sickle-shaped ribs and a groove along the triple-keeled groove along the outer edge of the shell.
Hildoceras features on the title page of my book Yorkshire Rock, a journey through time, which was published 25 years ago by the British Geological Survey (see link below).
There’s a folktale that they’re the fossilised remains of serpents, driven from the cliff top at Whitby by Abbess St Hilda.
Yorkshire Rock, a journey through time at my website Willow Island Editions
Low tide is around midday, so we’re enjoying the two mile walk along the sand from Sandsend to Whitby. It was high time that we came to see the sea again. The waves heave and sigh; the surf swishes and fizzes.
Whitby harbour, 12.25 p.m., 59ºF, 15ºC, cool breeze from sea, hazy: A cormorant flies low over the water and out to sea via the harbour mouth.
A crow probes around the barnacle encrusted rocks on the west side of the harbour. Three or four redshanks fly up from the water’s edge, piping as they go.
Nearer the bridge, the herring gulls have the mud bank staked out. A turnstone does just that – turns over a stone – as we pass. In fact in the minute or so that we’re walking by it turns over four stones. When we humans are rock-pooling the advice is to carefully replace every stone we turn so as not to disrupt the habitat. The turnstone doesn’t bother with that.
THE LAKE DISTRICT is so often moody, wrapped in clouds and mist, so today, with ranks of cumulus marching across a clear blue sky and sparkling panoramas unfolding before us, our regular journey was a different experience. After so many years of heading along the Leeds ring road to get on the road to the Lakes, the A65 via Skipton, we’ve found a short cut on smaller quieter roads following the ridges between some of the old woollen towns of the West Riding – Huddersfield, Mirfield, Halifax and Bradford – not far away in the valleys below.
It was so clear that already, as we approached Howarth over the moors, we got glimpses of the sphinx-like peaks of Ingleborough and Pen-y-Ghent crouching on the limestone plateau of the Yorkshire Dales National Park.
Coming this way, along the smaller but slower roads, the Dalesman Cafe at Gargrave, 1 hour 20 minutes but only 40 miles into our journey, makes a timely coffee stop. They specialise in ephemera of the 1950s and 1960s so as I tried a local speciality, buttered Chorley cake, the tins and packages of the period brought back memories for us.
I sketched this shrimping net from an earlier period, still with its canvas bag stencilled ‘W EGLON, NEPTUNE FISH STORES, WHITBY, TEL. 60’. I wonder whereabout in Whitby that was . . .
A Google search turns up this reference to the Eglon family from the 1891 census (http://mdfs.net/Docs/Whitby/Census1891/Whitby10), when they were living in four rooms in Elephant & Castle Yard, between Haggersgate and Cliff Street, so very near what is still the fish quay at Whitby. I guess that Neptune Fish Stores would have been there or very near.
4 Elephant & Castle Yard (4 rooms)
Eglon, Christopher - Head - M M 41 - Fish Merchant - YKS, Whitby
Eglon, Eliza - Wife - M F 41 - - YKS, Whitby
Eglon, Mary E - Daughter - S F 21 - Dressmaker - YKS, Whitby
Eglon, William - Son - S M 19 - Fisherman - YKS, Whitby
Eglon, Christopher - Son - M 14 - Errand Boy - YKS, Whitby
Eglon, Esther - Daughter - F 12 - Scholar - YKS, Whitby
Eglon, James H - Son - M 10 - Scholar - YKS, Whitby
Eglon, Margaret E - Daughter - F 7 - Scholar - YKS, Whitby
William, born in 1872, must be the ‘W. Eglon’ named on the bag but sadly his business, Neptune Fish Stores (Whitby) Ltd, was wound up in 1969, at a time when the traditional English seaside resorts had lost out to competition from package holidays to the Mediterranean.
I’m certainly getting in holiday mood today, I’m beginning to feel like a different person, as if a burden has been lifted from my shoulders, as we approach the Lakes and leave the distractions of home and work behind. As the rugged peaks of the Borrowdale volcanics come into view a Buzzard circles above the road.
Bowness can be as busy as a traditional seaside town – the Blackpool of the Lake District – but, as we’ve booked in for a few days at the Belsfield Hotel overlooking the Lake Windermere, we can stay after the weekend trippers return home.
There’s a perfect sunset, a clear sky across the lake. In this old hotel, originally the home of a wealthy Victorian industrialist, you have the feeling that you’ve got away from everything; as if you’re aboard one of the old, opulent ocean liners. When we walk down for our meal in the sumptuous dining room, past the reception desk, we glimpse sparkling water through the lounge window. You feel that the whole hotel might be gliding over calm waters. Hopefully with no icebergs on the horizon. The bustling piers where the ferries come and go are hidden away behind the grassy banks of the hotel gardens.
Links; Walney Owl Sanctuary, Belsfield Hotel