A Month in Yorkshire. Walter White
therefore, only as a diminished and diminishing parish, and in the few scattered cottages near the bank of the Humber. The old font was carried away from the church to Skeffling, where it is preserved in the garden of the parsonage.
Her reminiscences ended, the good woman talked of the rough walking that lay before me. It was a wild place out there, not often visited by strangers; but sometimes “wagon loads o’ coontra foak cam’ to see t’ loights.” At one time, as I have heard, a stage-coach used to do the journey for the gratification of the curious.
A short distance beyond the Crown and Anchor stands a small lone cottage built of sea-cobbles, with a sandy garden and potato-plot in front, and a sandy field, in which a thin, stunted crop of rye was making believe to grow. Once past this cottage, and all is a wild waste of sand, covered here and there with reedy grass, among which you now and then see a dusty pink convolvulus, struggling, as it were, to keep alive a speck of beauty amid the barrenness. Here, as old chronicles tell, the king once had ‘coningers,’ or rabbit-warrens, and rabbits still burrow in the hillocks. Presently, there is the wide open sea on your left, and you can mark the waves rushing up on either side, hissing and thundering against the low bank that keeps them apart.
“A broad long sand in the shape of a spoon,” is the description given of Spurn in a petition presented to parliament nearly two hundred years ago; and, if we suppose the spoon turned upside down, it still answers. It narrows and sinks as it projects from the main shore for about two miles, and this part being the weakest and most easily shifted by the rapid currents, is strengthened every few yards by rows of stakes driven deeply in, and hurdle work. You see the effect in the smooth drifts accumulated in the space between the barriers, which only require to be planted with grass to become fixed. As it is, the walking is laborious: you sink ankle-deep and slide back at every step, unless you accept the alternative of walking within the wash of the advancing wave. For a long while the lighthouse appears to be as far off as ever.
A little farther, and we are on a rugged embankment of chalk: the ground is low on each side, and a large pond rests in the hollow between us and the sea on the left, marking the spot where, a few years ago, the sea broke through and made a clean sweep all across the bank. Every tide washed it wider and deeper, until at last the fishing-vessels used it as a short cut in entering or departing from the river. The effect of the breach would, in time, had a low-water channel been established, have seriously endangered the shore of the estuary, besides threatening destruction to the site of the lighthouse. As speedily, therefore, as wind and weather would permit, piles and stakes were driven in, and the gap was filled up with big lumps of chalk brought from the quarry at Barton, forming an embankment sloped on both sides, to render the shock of the waves as harmless as possible. The trucks, rails, and sleepers with which the work had been accomplished were still lying on the sand, awaiting removal. Henceforth measures of precaution will be taken in time, for a conservator of the river has been appointed.
The depth of the bay formed by the spoon appears to increase more and more each time you look back. How vast is the curve between this bank of chalk and the point where we struck the shore from Skeffling! The far-spreading sands—or rather mud—are known as the Trinity Dry Sands. At this moment they are disappearing beneath the rising tide, and you can easily see what thousands of acres might be reclaimed were a barrier erected to keep out the water. “Government have been talkin’ o’ doing it for years,” said a fisherman to whom I talked at Kilnsea, “but ’taint begun yet.”
Desolate as is now the scene, it was once enlivened by the dwellings of men and the stir of commerce. Off the spot where we stand, there lay, five hundred years ago, a low islet, accessible by a flat ridge of sand and yellow pebbles, known as Ravenser Odd, or Ravensrode, as some write it. “Situate at the entry to the sea,” it was a port regarded with envy and fear by the merchants of Grimsby and Hull, for its pilots were skilful, and its traders enterprising. For a time it flourished; but while the rival Roses wasted the realm, the sea crept nearer, and at length, after an existence of a century and a half, distinctly traceable in ancient records and old books, a high tide, enraged by a storm, ended the history of Ravenser Odd with a fearful catastrophe. A gravelly bank, running outwards, still discoverable by excavation, is believed to be the foundation of the low, flat ridge of sand and yellow pebbles along which the folk of the little town passed daily to and fro; among them at times strange seamen and merchants from far-away lands, and cowled monks and friars pacing meekly on errands of the Church.
And yonder, near the bottom of the curve, stood the town variously described as Ravenser, Ravenspurne, and Ravenspurg—a town that sent members to parliament in the reigns of the first two Edwards, and was considered of sufficient importance to be invited to take part in the great councils held in London, when the “kinge’s majestie” desired to know the naval forces of the kingdom. Now, twice a day, the tide rolls in triumphantly over its site.
“The banish’d Bolingbroke repeals himself,
And with uplifted arms is safe arriv’d
At Ravenspurg,”
writes Shakspeare, perpetuating alike the name of the place and the memory of the Duke of Lancaster’s adventure,—an adventure brought before us in an invective by the fiery Hotspur, which I may, perhaps, be pardoned for introducing here:
“My father, my uncle, and myself,
Did give him that same royalty he wears:
And,—when he was not six and twenty strong,
Sick in the world’s regard, wretched and low,
A poor unminded outlaw, sneaking home,—
My father gave him welcome to the shore:
And,—when he heard him swear a vow to God,
He came but to be Duke of Lancaster,
To sue his livery, and beg his peace;
With tears of innocency and terms of zeal,—
My father, in kind heart and pity mov’d,
Swore him assistance, and performed it too.
Now, when the lords and barons of the realm
Perceived Northumberland did lean to him,
The more and less came in with cap and knee;
Met him in boroughs, cities, villages;
Attended him on bridges, stood in lanes,
Laid gifts before him, proffered him their oaths,
Gave him their heirs; as pages follow’d him,
Even at the heels, in golden multitudes.
He presently,—as greatness knows itself,—
Steps me a little higher than his vow
Made to my father, while his blood was poor,
Upon the naked shore at Ravenspurg.”
The cross set up to commemorate the landing was shifted from place to place when endangered by the sea, and lastly to Hedon, where it still remains, as already mentioned. It was at the same port that Edward IV. landed, with an excuse plausible as that of the duke whose exploit he imitated.
Though it be “naked” still, and toilsome to walk on, the shore is by no means barren of interest. By-and-by we come to firm ground, mostly covered with thickly-matted grass; a great irregular, oval mound, which represents the bowl of the spoon reversed. Near its centre is a fenced garden and a row of cottages—the residence of the life-boat crew. A little farther, on the summit of the ridge, stands the lighthouse, built by Smeaton, in 1776, and at the water’s edge, on the inner side, the lower light. The principal tower is ninety feet in height, and from the gallery at the top you get an excellent bird’s-eye view over sea and land. Most remarkable is the tongue of sand along which we have walked, now visible in its whole extent and outline. It is lowest where the breach was made, and now that the tide has risen higher, the chalk embankment seems scarcely above the level of the water. Beyond that it broadens away to the shore of the estuary on one side, and the coast of Holderness on the other—low, sweeping lines which your eye follows for miles. By the waste of that coast the Spurn is maintained, and the Trinity Sands are