It is a busy time in the garden right now as the May weather has provided perfect growing conditions.
Kim is busy looking after the perennial and shrub beds and preparing summer bedding for later displays…
My job is the vegetable plot where I am growing potatoes, beans and peas, tomatoes, onions and courgettes. All coming along very nicely indeed.
After a couple of hours labour each day, it is time to sit back and enjoy…
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.
The market was about one hundred yards long and we made it to the top with only a couple of purchases but then of course we had to turn around and walk all of the way back and run the gauntlet of the stallholders for a second time. Sally seemed to pick up the knack of bartering much easier than I did and I think we bought some tee shirts and a couple of bracelets but to be honest I can’t be absolutely sure.
Posted in Arts and Crafts, Childhood, Europe, Food, Hotels, Morocco, Travel, Turkey, World Heritage
Tagged Culture, Efes Beer, Life, Market bartering, Market Shopping, Markets, Sarigerme, Suntopia Tropical Hotel
I decided to take the opportunity to seek out more ruins and set off to find the site of the Mausoleum of Mausolus, the origin of the word mausoleum and one of the original Wonders of the Ancient World. This was once a magnificent forty-five metre high marble tomb, decorated with statues and friezes and built in the third century BC as a burial chamber for King Mausolus of Caria.
In my previous post I talked about the Spalding Tulip Festival and it reminded me of one of my favourite Tulip stories…
… This is not a botanical story but one of linguistic misunderstanding…
The name Tulip was first applied to the plant by a man called Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq who was a Dutch ambassador in Turkey in the sixteenth century and was also a great floral enthusiast. One day he was talking to a sultan and he noticed that he was wearing an attractive flower in his head wear.
When I say talking what I mean is that they were communicating with each other in the way that people do when they can’t speak each other’s language with lots of funny faces and wild gesticulations and misunderstandings.
I digress here and give an example from my own experience…
Now, I know that like most English people my grasp of foreign languages is not that good but this experience in the Spanish city of Palencia was quite bizarre.
“Catedral?” I enquired and the poor man (victim) that I had selected just stared back at me with an expressionless face as though I was a visitor from another planet. So I tried again but this time, remembering that upside down question mark thing at the beginning of the sentence I tried to sound a bit more Spanish, “¿Catedral?” but his face went so blank that I though rigor mortis had set in. I have to say that Catedral sounds a bit like Cathedral to me so I don’t know why this was so difficult but his solution was to call someone else over who was an obviously educated man who spoke excellent English and with optimism I tried again “¿Catedral?”
To my astonishment he immediately adopted exactly the same blank face as the first man so I tried again in various different accents and voice inflections. “¿Catedral?” “¿Catedral?” “¿Catedral?” Nothing, Nothing, Nothing. I really cannot understand why this should be so difficult. If a Spanish man came up to me in Lincoln and asked for directions to the Cathedral – however he might pronounce it, I am fairly sure that I could make out what he was asking for. Eventually I gave up, added the h sound and just asked in English for directions to the Cathedral and amazingly I immediately made myself understood and the man smiled and said “Ah, Catedral!” which, I am fairly certain is exactly what I said in the first place.
To continue…
Busbecq was curious about the flower and pointed to it and enquired its name. In Turkey the name of the flower was a Lale (prounced lalay) but the Sultan thought he meant what is the name of his hat so he told him it was a Tulipan or turban and Busbeqc, who completely misunderstood, acquired some bulbs and sent them back to Europe with the information that they were called Tulipa.
A good job that he wasn’t wearing a pork pie hat or tulips would be porkies!
Now, this is important information in case we have another vegetable supply crisis.
All parts of tulips are edible and the bulb can be substituted for onions (although they are a little more expensive and less flavourful). The Dutch ate tulip bulbs in the hard times of World War Two even though the petals have little taste but could be used to garnish a dish, chop a few petals and throw them in a salad, sugar them to decorate a cake or use the entire flower for a fruit bowl, pinching out the pistil and stamen in the middle.
Incidentally the tulip is the national flower of Iran and Turkey where it is still called the Lale.
The history of the Spalding Flower Parade stretches back to the 1920s when the sheer number and variety of tulip bulbs grown throughout the area surrounding the market town became an annual feast of colour.
The crowds that came in created many problems for the town and coaches and cars caused chaos on the narrow lanes around the fields and this continued to happen until in 1948, the Growers’ Association became involved in organising a Tulip Week. With the help of the Royal Automobile Club, a twenty-five mile tour through villages and country lanes was planned to show the best fields.
Posted in Arts and Crafts, Europe, History, Holland, Literature, Natural Environment, Postcards, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Amsterdam, Life, Photography, Spalding, Spalding Flower Parade, Travel, Tulip Fields, Tulip Summit.
The island of Rhodes is one of the most interesting and has been inhabited for six thousand years and due to its geographical position on the major Mediterranean Sea trade routes is situated at a natural crossroads between Europe, the Middle East, and Africa and this has given the city and the island many different identities, cultures, architectures, and languages over its long and varied history.
Posted in Arts and Crafts, Beaches, Cathedrals, Europe, Food, Greece, Greek islands, Greek Taverna, History, Knights of St John, Literature, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Culture, Dodecanese Islands, Holidays, Knights of St John, Lindos, Photography, rhodes, Travel
I began this series of posts about Entrance Tickets in April 2014 and this was one of the early ones. I cannot really explain why but I have always kept my Entrance Tickets and they remain safely stored in a travel memory box.
The series of posts cannot go on much longer however. I am running out of material, not because I no longer visit places when I am travelling but because so many places no longer issue paper tickets. Booking is done on line and instead of a ticket there is a QR code on a mobile phone to swipe through a scanner.
I like the feel of a ticket, I like told it between my fingers and judge the quality, this one at Cordoba was especially fine and then I like to carefully put it in between the pages of my guide book to make sure that it doesn’t get creased.
I think that this is rather a shame. Places generally need to be booked in advance with an allocated time slot. It is no longer possible to wander up to a entrance booth, hand over cash and receive a nice shiny Entrance Ticket in exchange. Somehow it takes the spontaneity out of city break travel, everything has to be done according to a timetable.
Posted in Africa, Arts and Crafts, El Cid, Europe, History, Postcards, Spain, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Andalusia, Antequera, Cordoba, Culture, El Cid, Parador Hotels, Photography, Reconquista, Travel
Skipsea beach is getting bigger. Every winter the storms gnaw away at the soft boulder clay cliffs and take away a few more feet and inches. It is the fastest eroding coastline in England. The savage North Sea is like a giant excavator.
Sometimes it is possible to visit and not really notice a great deal of change but not so this year. The Winter storms of 2023 have been especially fierce and the sea has taken away more than usual.
Today we walked along the beach from Skipsea to Barmston, a distance of about four miles. The tide was out, the sun was shining and the wind was blowing a gale. The sand was damp but firm and we made steady progress towards our destination.
We were last here just nine months ago but we detected huge change.
The advance of the sea is relentless. This is an unfortunate stretch of coastline and I say unfortunate because in the local Coastal Management Plan it is identified as a place not worth defending against the advancing sea and one day it will be gone. Every year six foot of land is swept away, an estimated average of two million tonnes which is moved south on the tides towards the Humber estuary and builds land there whilst it takes it away here. It is called ‘managed retreat’.
A holiday chalet waiting for the day of destiny…
There used to be an attempt to stop the inevitable and these are the remains of some wooden groynes that the sea just laughed at…
On a previous visit I once came across an official looking man in a hard hat and a yellow high visibility jacket who was taking photographs and making notes. His name was Brian and I asked him about the erosion. He explained to me that the problem is that this coastline really shouldn’t be here at all because it is made up of unconsolidated soft clay and small stones called glacial till that were scooped up from the sea bed by a glacier as it advanced south during the last ice age and dumped here as the ice eventually melted and receded north about ten thousand years ago.
It is just soft clay with the consistency and the look of a crumbly Christmas Cake that simply cannot resist the power of the waves. In that time an area of land twelve miles wide has been eroded away and returned to the sea bed where it came from. Not really an ideal sort of place to build houses and construct roads. Once, not so long ago, there was a row of houses here with long stretched gardens enjoying glorious sea views. All gone.
Along the way we came across a fisherman tending his nets, nets stretching out to sea and full of fish, he told us that he came down every day to get his catch but it was becoming a chore because a great deal of the eroding cliffs was getting caught in the net and it took him a long time every day to clear them. He said that he was packing them up now and moving on, aggravation from the recently arrived gypsies hadn’t helped especially as one day recently they had stolen his quad bike and left him stranded on the beach. Luckily for him he got it back later.
Further along was a great deal of concrete debris, the remains of Second World War coastal defences called pill boxes, because they looked like pill boxes. It is not known for sure but it is estimated that there were once twenty-eight thousand of them both around the coast and further inland as well. There were different types and designs based on the type of invasion that might be encountered. Bigger and stronger if there was the possibility of tanks and heavy artillery, not so strong if the threat was from parachuting invaders and hostile infantry. As it happened none of them were needed for their intended purpose. Today it is estimated that there are roughly six thousand of them left.
I can’t imagine that it was very pleasant being on duty in a pill box. Cold and austere, long hours of nothing to do but scan the water, no toilet facilities and no internet for entertainment.
These ruined specimens once sat high above the cliffs, half a mile or so inland but now they have given way not to an army of soldiers but the invasion of the relentless sea.
Someone clearly has a sense of humour about the situation…
Posted in Arts and Crafts, Beaches, Childhood, Europe, Food, History, Natural Environment, Travel, United Kingdom
Tagged Coastal Erosion, east Yorkshire, Fishing, Holderness, King Canute, Skipsea Gypsies, Skipsea Sands
I have been to Bridlington several times now. The very first time that I visited in 2015 I didn’t care for the place at all so I didn’t really give it a fair chance, didn’t stay very long and left swiftly. I wrote a critical post about it which I have subsequently apologised for. So I have grown to rather like the town and the harbour and it has some interesting stories to tell.
If Bridlington was in Cornwall then celebrity chef Rick Stein would have an expensive seafood restaurant on the quay, every TV presenter and his dog ever would do a series about it, Doc Martin would be filmed there and people would flock there in their thousands.
Actually, thank goodness that they don’t.
Here is an interesting fact…
The north-east coast through Yorkshire and County Durham has the largest fishing industry in England in terms of employment and quantity of sea food caught, landed and processed. At thirty-seven million tonnes in 2021 it just edged out Brixham in Devon and left Newlyn in Cornwall way behind. The coast has four major fishing ports, Grimsby, Hull, Hartlepool and Bridlington.
Now, this might come as a surprise bit of information but Bridlington is the lobster capital of Europe, landing over three hundred tonnes of the North Sea crustacean every year. According to the Government’s Marine Management Organisation, lobster fetches the highest average price of all species landed by the UK fleet at over £10 per kilogram, they account for only two per cent of the weight of shellfish landings, but twelve per cent of the value. Which is why Bridlington, which lands almost no actual fish, is Yorkshire’s most lucrative fishing port.
The shellfish it lands is worth £7.2m more than all the fish and shellfish landed at Grimsby and Whitby combined, £4m of which is accounted for by lobster.
In the UK we don’t eat a lot of lobster except in high end restaurants and exclusive London clubs and most of it is exported to Europe.
People in Portugal eat more fish than any other in mainland Europe, fifty-seven kilograms per head per year which is like eating your way through an average sized cod or tuna, Norway is second, Spain third and then France and Finland.
In the UK we like to think of ourselves as fish eaters and we voted to leave Europe on the basis of getting our fishing fleets back but we only eat cod or haddock or anything else from the same genus ( hake, colin, pollack etc.) and on average we eat a miserly fifteen kilograms per person per year.
In mainland Europe, those who eat least fish are Albanians at only five kilograms followed by people from Serbia and North Macedonia and what is surprising is that none of these are really that far from the sea.
The most popular fish in the UK is cod and in the USA it is prawns (shrimp), Canada and in Australia it is salmon; in France it is sea bass and in Spain hake. The most popular Christmas Day meal in Australia is prawns (shrimp).
Throw another prawn on the Barbie there Bruce.
All of these obscure facts are worth jotting down and remembering if you are in a pub quiz team.
I will be going back to Bridlington again next month and I fully intend to find a restaurant selling Bridlington Bay Lobster. Apparently it is important to be careful if you want the real thing because as we export almost all of our lobster to Europe then the UK market depends on imports from Canada. What a crazy world we live in.
Today was rather windy, well, very windy actually so there weren’t many boats leaving the safety of the harbour and the boats were all safely moored up. A walk along the harbour wall brought us to a statue of a young woman, a Gansey girl.
A Gansey is a distinctive woollen sweater, originally designed to provide protection for fishermen from wind and water. They were traditionally made by fishermen’s wives using five ply wool (Kim tells me that is rather thick) and five needles (Kim tells me that is rather hard work). It was (is) a tight knit made in one piece with no seams so as to keep the weather out.
Each Gansey pattern was unique to the town or harbour where the men sailed from and in this way if there was an accident at sea and men were lost overboard then they could be identified by their Gansey. The patterns on the garment all relate to the sea, boats, nets, pots and fish and the tradition continues today.
Next time in Bridlington I will tell you about some famous people associated with the town.
Posted in Arts and Crafts, Europe, Food, History, Literature, Natural Environment, Travel, United Kingdom
Tagged Bridlington, Bridlington Harbour, east Yorkshire, Fishing UK, Holderness, Lobster, Seaside Holidays
Have Bag, Will Travel 