THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

Perhaps the fulness of the North Sea’s charm is never realised until one has seen it in winter or in the gales of autumn and early spring.  Seen under these conditions it becomes a thing of gigantic life, a perpetual reminder to the folk who live on its shores of the mighty forces of nature which lie behind it.  They themselves are not less interesting than the sea from which most of them gain a living.  Successors of the hardy Norsemen who came across the ocean centuries ago, many of them retain the names of their ancestors, and in some places a man might fancy himself in Norway or Denmark rather than in England.  Like all dwellers on the coast they are not too free of speech, and it is only by long coaxing and patient forbearance that one can get stories of the sea out of the weather-beaten old salts who hang about the wharves of Scarborough or Whitby, gazing seaward with that curious fixed stare which takes in even the shifting of a cloud.  But if they will talk, and especially if they talk by the light of a winter fire, what time a howling storm is raging along the cliffs and headlands and over the wild waters at their feet, they will tell of marvellous things and mighty deeds which they have known and seen along the coast-line ‘twixt Tees and Humber.

Fletcher/Picturesque3