East Yorkshire and the Thirty-Seven Mile Holderness Coast

I begin with a question.  What is the longest uninterrupted stretch of beach in the UK?   I mean the longest stretch that can be walked end to end without having to leave it at any point to get around estuaries, rivers, cliffs, ports or towns?

To be honest I don’t have the answer, I have Googled it and there is no help but I am willing to wager that it is the Holderness coast in East Yorkshire.  It stretches all the way from Bridlington harbour to Spun Head at the mouth of the Humber estuary  and it is possible to walk the entire distance without ever  leaving the sand.  Few people know this because it isn’t in Cornwall or on the South coast and celebrities don’t make TV programmes about it.  Is it just me but does anyone else get fed up with programmes about bloody Cornwall.  

It stretches for a distance of thirty-seven miles.

I am more than happy to consider alternative suggestions of course.

I couldn’t manage the full thirty-seven miles in one day but today we planned to walk a seven mile stretch from the caravan park at Brampton  Sands to Bridlington, a distance of about seven miles or so, give or take a yard or so.

We set off just after high tide.  The weather was wild but not cold, big seas, a blustery wind that tugged at our shirt buttons and the occasional threat from a rogue wave that was in apparent denial that the tide was going out and not coming in as it swept in and rearranged the pebbles with a clattering sound like the percussion section of an orchestra.

For a mile or so there was no one else sharing our beach, deserted sands, pill-box remains fallen into the sea, a splendid lonely isolation as we walked on between the rapidly eroding cliffs on one side and the wild angry sea on the other.

Along the way we came across a colony of Swifts who had build nests in the cliff face.  I say cliffs but this is soft mud not solid rock.  Anyway they were going and coming at great speed and you will have to take my word for this because they are so fast that I was quite unable to catch a single picture of just one of them.  They are the fastest land bird of all, flying at a speed of seventy miles an hour in level flight.

After leaving the nest a young bird spends up to four years in the air without coming down, they eat and sleep on the wing, they fly five hundred miles a day and most impressive of all they also mate in the air.  To put that into perspective the only way a human can get a shag while flying is to join the mile high club on a Boeing 737.

A little further on we chanced upon some Oyster Catchers busy dining among the pebbles, they let us approach but not get too close before taking to flight but thankfully they were not as quick as the Swifts.

And then there was a problem.  We came to a field drainage outfall that due to the recent heavy rains was in full flow, maybe two or three inches deep and about five yards wide.  Maybe this was a turning back point?  No, surely not!

I ventured forth and attempted to jump the fast flowing watery streams,  I made the first and the second but then got carried away and quite forgot that what I could manage forty years ago I cannot manage now and took one optimistic jump too many and landed ankle deep in ice cold water with a resulting wet boot.

Kim was a lot more sensible and took time to collect rocks to make a stepping stone path and fifteen minutes later when she was eventually satisfied with her construction efforts daintily crossed over and we carried on.  I manfully kept quiet about my wet foot and soggy sock.

After an hour or so we arrived at Bridlington South Beach, as good as any beach in England in my opinion, a fabulous stretch of golden sand, busy I guess in the Summer months but quite deserted today.  Just a few dog walkers.  I really liked it.  I didn’t like the dog walkers.

From there we passed to the harbour, I was hoping to buy some Bridlington Bay lobster.  I told you about that in a previous post.

Bridlington – A Royalist Queen and the English Civil War

I never guessed that there was so much history in Bridlington.  I have discovered Lawrence of Arabia,  Saint John, David Hockney and next up a Royal Queen.

In early 1642 there were the early exchanges of the English Civil War.  King Charles was anxious to secure the port of Hull because (a bit of a surprise this) at the time it had the second largest store of armaments in England after London and was an important trading port with Europe, mostly for Yorkshire wool.  The Parliamentarians were also keen on the weapons and the gunpowder that was stored there and having control of the city denied him and his forces entry.  Their followed a rather ineffective siege and a hasty retreat to York.

Charles needed an alternative supply of munitions so implemented plan B.  He collected up all of the Crown Jewels and asked his wife Queen Henrietta Maria of France to make her way to Holland and France to use them to purchase arms.

The business concluded, the Queen, protected by seven Dutch ships returned to England in February 1643 but unable to use the port of Hull entered the nearby harbour in Bridlington instead.

The Parliamentary navy attempted to  intercept the Queen and her precious cargo and for some time it had been cruising in the North Sea and was then at anchor off Newcastle.  It immediately set off upon receiving intelligence of her arrival but did not gain the bay until the night after the Dutch vessels had entered the port. The Queen disembarked and escaped.

The Parliamentary fleet persisted and  determined on harassing the royalists and accordingly drew their vessels directly opposite to the Quay, on which they commenced a heavy cannonade in hope of firing the ammunition-vessels.

Some of the shots penetrated the house in which the Queen was sheltering and compelled her and the other ladies in her retinue to seek for safety beneath the precipitous banks of the stream which empties itself into the harbour.  The Gypsy Race is a rather sad little stream now, full of litter and abandoned shopping trolleys but four hundred years ago was a full flowing river.  Still is west of Bridlington.

Eventually the Queen escaped the town and made her way to nearby York with the valuable cargo.

Since my Dad bought me an Airfix model kit of Oliver Cromwell in about 1960 I have always been fascinated by the English Civil War.  I think this was a defining moment in my life, I immediately became a Roundhead, a Parliamentarian and later a socialist, on the side of the people fighting against wealth, influence, lies, privilege and injustice.  Just to be clear that is the modern day Conservative Party.

There was also an Airfix model of Charles I with a detachable head but I had Cromwell first.  Strange how something has simple as that can have an influence on a young enquiring mind.

I also blame a book my Dad gave me about British heroes in which Cromwell was included but Charles Stuart wasn’t.

An illustration from the book…

In 2002 the BBC conducted a poll to identify the Greatest Briton and Cromwell came tenth, hard to believe that he could come behind Diana, Princess of Wales  and John Lennon but there you are, such is the nature of these polls and the mentality of the people who vote.  Two thousand years of history and Princess Diana and John Lennon make the top ten.  It leaves me speechless.

I have always considered the English Civil War to be the most important conflict of modern Europe because this was a revolution which provided a blueprint for those that followed, the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917.

The revolution begins with the moderates calling for reasonable and restrained reform for the exclusive benefit of the aforementioned wealthy and privileged who wanted even more power and wealth.  The problem with moderates of course is that they are on the whole reasonable people but by beginning a process of reform they provide an opportunity  for radicals and agitators to go much further and the English Revolution like those that followed swiftly gained pace.  After the radicals came the extremists, then war, then terror, then regicide.

The English Civil War swept away the supremacy of the Church of England, ended the Divine Right of Kings and embodied the principal of Parliamentary Sovereignty into the English constitution.  It was the end of medieval feudalism and paved the way for the agrarian and industrial revolutions of the next century.  At its most radical period it introduced the principals of socialism and even communism through the power of the New Model Army and the social ambitions of the Diggers and the Levellers, both proto-socialist political movements.

It is a shame that King Charles had his head cut off but even after sixty years or so of being given that Airfix model I confess that I remain a loyal Roundhead rather than a Cavalier.

Queen Henrietta Maria was exiled to France in 1649 upon the execution of Charles I but returned in 1660 upon the Restoration.  She didn’t stay long, returned to France and died nine years later at the age of fifty-nine from an accidental overdose of opiates that she was taking for pain relief in respect of severe bronchitis.  Another accidental Bridlington death.

A statue commemorating the English Civil War in the town of Newark in Nottinghamshire…

Bridlington and Lawrence of Arabia

I am often guilty of visiting a place only rather briefly and that means only scratching the surface and I don’t really get to some of the more important stories.

Bridlington as it turns out has been home to some famous people.  First up TE Lawrence of Lawrence of Arabia fame.  This is him in the Arabian dessert, not on Bridlington beach.  What a great story that would have been.

After the First World War and his heroics in the Middle East and a spell in the Foreign Office Lawrence joined the RAF in 1922 and went east again, this time to the east of England and he was posted to the RAF Bridlington Marine Detachment Unit in 1932 where he worked on a project to develop high speed sea rescue boats.  He returned to the seaside town between November 1934 and February 1935 to see out his service pending his retirement.

While Lawrence wrote prosaically about his time in Arabia he had rather mixed feelings about Bridlington. His 1932 visit was during the busy summer season, but a letter written on 28th November 1934 described the town as ‘a silent place, where cats and landladies’ husbands walk gently down the middles of the street. I prefer the bustle of summer …’

Perhaps the quiet atmosphere prompted Lawrence to get away from Bridlington and ride around Yorkshire. He visited York, Skipsea, Hull, Beverley, Goole and it is likely he also paid visits to nearby Whitby and Scarborough.

Lawrence used to amuse himself by driving his motorcycle, a Brough Superior SS 100 along the Bridlington esplanade at high speed.

The Brough Superior SS 100 was a motorcycle designed and built by George Brough in Nottingham in 1924. Every bike was designed to meet specific customer requirements and even the handlebars were individually shaped.  They were a luxury item which cost almost twice as much as a family car at about the same time and they were advertised by Brough as the “Rolls-Royce of Motorcycles”.  The term was used by a magazine road tester in his review of the bike and Brough eventually obtained explicit permission to use it after a Rolls-Royce executive toured the Brough Superior factory to satisfy himself that it was appropriate.

These bikes were really powerful, at a time when the average car would struggle to reach sixty miles per hour, the Brough with its 1000cc engine was guaranteed to reach one hundred and it was the combination of bike and speed that did for Lawrence.

The crash that would end Lawrence’s life came while riding on a narrow road near his cottage near Wareham in 1935. The accident occurred because a dip in the road obstructed his view of two boys on bicycles.  Swerving to avoid them, Lawrence lost control and was thrown over the handlebars. He was not wearing a helmet and suffered serious head injuries that left him in a coma and he died after six days in hospital.

the original Brough factory went out of business in 1941 but the brand has been recently revived and is available again now, this model is named after Lawrence himself…

My favourite story about Lawrence has nothing to do with Bridlington but here it is anyway…

Lawrence kept extensive notes throughout the course of his involvement in the First-World-War and he began work in 1919 on the manuscript of his book ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom’.  By December it was almost complete but he lost it when he misplaced his briefcase while changing trains at Reading railway station sometime in the following year.  It was never recovered and he had to start all over again which was obviously a bit of a bugger.

Another famous loss is the story of Thomas Carlyle and his book ‘The French Revolution: A History’.  In 1835 he finished volume one and gave it to his friend John Stuart Mill to read for his comments.

Unfortunately it was the only copy of the work and Mill’s servant allegedly mistook the book for household rubbish and used it as a convenient source of material to get the kitchen fire going one morning!

Unlike Lawrence, Carlyle apparently kept no notes at all and had to completely rewrite the first volume entirely from memory.

Little wonder he looked so glum…

In 1922 Ernest Hemingway lost his entire early work including the only copies when his wife had a suitcase stolen from a train in Paris as she was transporting it to her husband in Switzerland.  I can’t imagine Hemingway being terribly understanding about that.

A sundial commemorates Lawrence’s connection with Bridlington situated in the South Cliff Gardens, a fitting tribute perhaps, given ‘El Aurens’ spent many months of his life under a blazing hot sun.

The inscription reads – “Only count your sunny hours, let others tell of storms and showers”

This is my Lawrence of Arabia impression, also not on Bridlington beach. What a great story that would have been.

National Baguette Day (USA)

An interesting one this one, a French baguette is way off being the most popular bread in the USA  but they still give it a celebration day.  Bread in the USA has a lot of sugar (insane amounts of sugar) and preservatives (insane amounts of preservatives)  but a traditional French baguette will only last about a day before it goes stale and hard and needs to go in the bin.

Some say Napoleon Bonaparte created the French baguette to allow soldiers to more easily carry bread with them. Since the round shape of other breads took up a lot of space, Bonaparte requested they be made into the skinny stick shape with specific measurements to slide into the soldiers’ uniform.

Maybe true, maybe not…

Read the full story Here…

Memory Post – First Cars

My first car was two tone blue Hillman Imp which was a twenty-first birthday present but it was unreliable and would only go for about thirty miles before seriously overheating.

I only kept it for a few months and I bought my own real first car, a flame red Hillman Avenger, a top of the range specification GL 1500cc, registration WRW 366J, which featured four round headlights internal bonnet release, two-speed wipers, brushed nylon seat trim (previously never used on British cars), reclining front seats (very important of course) , hockey stick rear light cluster and a round dial dashboard with extra instrumentation.

Oh Boy, I was so proud of that car.

I have had many since of course including a blue TR7 …

… and my first company car…

… but, if I could have any of my old cars back from the scrap yard it would just have to be be my red Hillman Avenger…

 

Read the full story Here…

Won’t Be Doing That Again (1)

In June 2012 we travelled to Russia for a two centre holiday in St Petersburg and Moscow.  Given the state of east/west relationships this is not something that I expect ever to do again.

Read part of the story Here…

Cheapskate Travel – Part One

Commenting on a recent post, a long term blogging pal of mine (who knows me so well) suggested that I am a cheapskate traveller.  I am so proud of this, it is like being nominated for an award at the Oscars, like winning an Olympic Gold Medal, like getting a mention in the New Year’s Honours List.

It reminded me of this post that I put up first in February 2014…

Complimentary Shampoo and Shower Gel…

“I still enjoy travelling a lot. I mean, it amazes me that I still get excited in hotel rooms just to see what kind of shampoo they’ve left me.”  –  Bill Bryson

Read the full story Here…

Portugal – Trouble at Supermarket Checkouts

In my previous post I dealt with the frustration associated with buying a train ticket in Portugal at a self service ticket machine.  Today I move on to the mystery of supermarket checkouts in Portugal.

In the country there were familiar supermarkets for us from the UK, ALDI and LIDL and then a couple  that were  not – Pingo Doce and Continente.  Continente is the largest supermarket chain in Portugal and Pingo Doce is the third. In Setubal we came across a convenient Pingo Doce located close by to the apartment so we went there to shop for our evening meal.

I liked all of these supermarkets in Portugal, they all had a much wider product range than in the UK, more bread, more fruit, more vegetables but especially more fish and whilst Kim shopped for essentials I browsed for fantasy.  The shopping experience is mostly similar to being in the UK and providing you remain focused you can have filled a basket, sidestepped the tempting but unwanted special offers, have negotiated all of the aisles  and be finished in just a few minutes. 

But then you get to the check-outs.

Chaos. Absolute chaos. In the UK you can expect to be through the checkout in under five minutes even if the two people in front both have a full trolley load to clear. Checkout staff in the UK are the fastest on the planet, no mercy if you don’t keep up.   If it was an Olympic event they would win gold, silver and bronze.  Not so in Portugal.  They would come last. Fifteen minutes in the store – thirty minutes (on a good day) waiting to pay.

And it was the same everywhere that we stayed and shopped in Portugal, Obidos, Cascais, Ericeira, Lisbon and now Setúbal.

A main reason for this is that most customers want to pay in cash but the cashiers have no coins in the tills so when someone offers a note they ask if they might possibly have the right change which involves fumbling in pockets and purses looking for loose, long forgotten coins.  “Oh, here is an Escudo, do you still take Escudo?”  Worst of all some customers just throw their coins down and let the cashier do the sorting and when it is all done take an age to put it away again.

This slows the whole process down to somewhere significantly below glacial speed and several conga lines of frustrated customers begin to form and begin to block up the aisles.  Although several frustrated people take the risk there is no point whatsoever  changing lanes because they are all the same.  They are all advancing at the pace of a silted up river bed.  This is life in the sloth lane.

Quite by chance there was some welcome entertainment as a group of university students entertained with music and singing which made the process a bit more tolerable but only just.

I have an important travel tip here…

DO NOT under any circumstances let the cashier see that you have a purse full of coins because they will beg to relieve you of it.  I swear that they are on a shift  bonus to get hold of coins.  I like to carry a little pouch with loose change, say about twenty euro or so but have learnt from experience never to show it.  One of my travel objectives is always to come home with my pouch full of coins ready for next time.

Behaviour at supermarket checkouts is something that intrigues me.  I wrote about it once in a post a long time ago (2010) and I do understand that it might be considered a bit sexist now but here it is now (with apologies where considered necessary)…

Read the full story Here…

So, we negotiated the checkout queue, went home with our purchases and had a simple meal of cooked piri-piri chicken, new potatoes and fresh salad and after as the sun began to slide into the River Sado took a walk to the shoreline and just sat and watched. 

Tomorrow we thought that we might try and find a beach.  We considered taking the apple green ferry to the Troia peninsular but decided instead to go for a hike.

 

Portugal – Obidos to Ericeira

Satisfied we hadn’t missed anything in Obidos we cleaned, left only footprints and exited the apartment and headed west towards the coast.

Our first destination was the peninsular of Peniche which I imagined to be a wild sort of place on the Atlantic Coast but which turned out to be an industrial/fishing sort of place which didn’t especially appeal to me.  It had some interesting rock formations recklessly sculptured  by the wild Atlantic winds and waves and then some sheltered sandy beaches next to industrial units where we stopped for mid morning drinks before quickly moving on south.

Sadly, I have to say that it wasn’t very exciting, nothing special at all.  Beaches obviously, beach bars obviously but all surprisingly quiet, September now and recovering perhaps from the now passed Summer blitz.  Hotels closed down for the year already.  We stopped a couple of times but didn’t stay anywhere long and we moved on directly to the coastal town of Ericeira, stopping off at supermarket Lidl on the way to pick up essential supplies and after lunch in the apartment we explored the small town and seafront area.

Portugal is one of the poorest countries in Europe and behind the attractive tiled walls we could see that the houses were really rather basic, but it is the seventh safest country in the world and the fourth biggest consumer of wine, after France, Italy and Germany and so, with the sun beating down we choose a table at a café close to the beach to help them maintain this important statistic.

It was early afternoon and really quite hot and the town had a soporific feel that made me think of my favourite Al Stewart song ‘Year of the Cat’:

‘She comes out of the sun in a silk dress running like a water colour in the rain, don’t bother asking for explanation she’ll just tell you she came from the Year of the Cat… By the blue tiled walls near the market stalls there’s a hidden door she leads you to, these days she says I feel my life is like a river running through, the Year of the Cat’

As the day got hotter the time was approaching the afternoon siesta as we sat and surveyed curiously deserted streets as though someone had declared a national emergency and everyone had left town.

Across the narrow lanes abandoned laundry remained hanging on overloaded balcony rails, starched and bleached by the sun to a perfect whiteness that had me reaching for my sunglasses, occasionally a loose shutter kissed a window frame and a whispering wave crashed gently onto the beach. Even the surf of the sea seemed to go quiet out of respect for the siesta.

Sitting at the pavement bar it was so quiet that I could hear the paint lifting and splitting on the wooden doors, the gentle creaking of rusty shutter hinges, the squeaking complaints of rattan as sleeping residents shifted a little in their balcony chairs and the faint crack of seed pods in the flower planters.

Eventually we made our weary way to the Fishermen’s  Beach where boats that looked barely seaworthy, held together by DIY repairs were  hauled up next to huts where swarthy salt streaked fishermen with ship-wreck faces went through the process of gutting and preparing fish for preparation and salting. .

The reason that fishing is such a major economic activity in Portugal is because the Portuguese people eat more fish per head than any other people in mainland Europe.  In recognition of this achievement it has been granted an ‘Exclusive Economic Zone’, which is a sea area in the Atlantic Ocean over which the Portuguese have special rights in respect of exploration and use of marine resources.  For the record it is the second largest Exclusive Economic Zone of the European Union, after France  and the eleventh largest in the world.

The Portuguese may eat a lot of fish but not I suspect, from places like this, more likely caught and processed in massive factory trawlers operating hundreds of miles away in the North Atlantic.

Never mind, it was all very entertaining and I captured some reasonably good pictures…

In the evening we walked further, this time along the surfing beaches.  I didn’t know this, how could I ,but Ericeira is the surfing capital of Europe named alongside Malibu in California, Freshwater Beach in Australia, Huanchaco Beach in Peru and only a handful of others.   The only one in Europe as it happens. Three in Australia, Four in South America and two in USA. We watched the brave people riding the surf as they mounted their boards and then promptly fell off.  It doesn’t look like a great deal of fun to me but then some people I know don’t like golf. 

An interesting factoid.  A  pod of seals is called a BOB and that seemed completely appropriate as people in black wet suits floated around in the sea like popped corks.

Another  interesting factoid.  Saint Christopher is the Patron Saint of Surfers.  Saint Andrew is the patron saint of fishermen.

This isn’t Saint Andrew it is a fisherman looking after his salted skate wings…

East Yorkshire – Saint John of Bridlington

On day three of our mini-holiday in East Yorkshire, the heatwave predictably broke, clouds returned, the temperature plummeted and the panic was all over.  This is England not the Costa Blanca.

So we made the short car journey to nearby Bridlington.  Bridlington remains a busy seaside resort because it still has a railway service and after the city of Hull is the second largest settlement in East Yorkshire.

We decided against the harbour and the beach because we had been there previously and quite frankly it is a bit too much English seasidy for us and the seagulls are a nuisance and went instead to the old town.  Free Parking! Where can you find Free Parking these days? Answer – Bridlington Old Town.

The historical centre of Bridlington is absolutely wonderful.

A cobbled street of rapid decay locked into a bygone age, the original Georgian shop windows are grubby, the displays are many decades out of date, the window frames are flaking and pock-marked, no wonder then that they choose this location for filming the remake of the comedy series ‘Dad’s Army’ in 2014. Being a huge ‘Dad’s Army’ fan I was really happy about wandering along this special street and made a note to watch the film when I was back at home. And I did!

We parked the car close to the Bayle Museum, the original fortified gatehouse to Bridlington Priory.  It had free admission so I wasn’t expecting a great deal but as it turned out it was well  worth almost an hour of time spent exploring the seven rooms and the history of Bridlington.  So good in fact that I didn’t have to think twice about paying a voluntary contribution on the way out.  That is unusual for me.

Next we visited the nearby Priory.  In the days of its medieval glory Bridlington Priory was one of the great monastic houses of England. Its wealth and possessions made it a key monastery in the North, one of the largest and richest of the Augustinian order.  The Priory is just a church now and a fraction of its previous size courtesy of the insistence of Henry VIII that it should be demolished in 1537 to remove the potential Catholic pilgrimage site of Saint John of Bridlington.  Henry didn’t like Catholic Saints and Pilgrimages as this challenged his new self-appointed role as Head of the Church of England.

Saint John of Bridlington, it turns out is one of the most famous of English Saints and I am ashamed to admit that I had never heard of him before now.

A little about John courtesy of Wiki…

Born in 1320 in the village of Thwing on the Yorkshire Wolds, about nine miles west of Bridlington, educated at a school in the village from the age of five, completing his studies at Oxford University and then entered the Augustinian Canons Regular community of Bridlington Priory. He carried out his duties with humility and diligence, and was in turn novice master, almsgiver, preacher and sub-prior. He became Canon of the Priory in 1346 and was eventually elected Prior in 1356. He served as Prior for 17 years before his death on 10 October 1379.

During his lifetime he enjoyed a reputation for great holiness and for miraculous powers. It is claimed that on one occasion he changed water into wine. He brought people back from the dead and restored a blind man’s sight.  On another, five seamen from Hartlepool in danger of shipwreck called upon God in the name of John, whereupon the prior himself walked on water and appeared to them and brought them safely to shore. 

It seems that anything Jesus could do, John of Bridlington could match.

So good was John at performing miracles that according to legend he continued to perform them even after he had died of the plague and he continued to bring people back from the dead for some time.  That’s a very good trick if you can do it.  These days I imagine John would be admitted to the Magic Circle.

John of Bridlington was canonised and declared a Saint by Pope Boniface in 1401, he was the last English Saint before the Reformation and the dissolution of the Monasteries in the reign of Henry VIII.

A Saint has to be a patron Saint of something and although John is associated with fishing the patron saint of fishermen had already been bagged by Saint Andrew (I will make you Fishers of Men and all that stuff) so Saint John needed something else.  The Spanish Saint Raymond Nonnat is the patron saint of pregnancy and childbirth but Saint John is very specifically the patron saint of difficult childbirth.  I kid you not.  You could not make it up.

The best bit about the church was a side chapel reserved for prayer where people are invited to leave a note requesting a prayer (or a miracle).  This one was my favourite…

Other Unlikely Saint Stories…

Saint James and Santiago de Compostella

Saint Patrick and Ireland

Saint Spiridon and Corfu

Saint Janurius and the Miracle of the Blood

The Feast of Saint Paul’s Shipwreck