All down the coast, the village folk live in fierce, detached shyness. Their Viking blood is still strong-running. They are a silent, dour people, busy among shore-wrack and sea-junk, nets, crab-pots, boats, tackle, and such. Their eyes are uncompromising.
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Many a time, with anxiety tugging at my heart, under a dirty sky full of rain, sleet, wrack, and tumult, and darkening to the four o’clock darkness of a December afternoon, I have watched from my sheltered vantage-point trawler after trawler, greasy smoke blowing away from their black-and-red-ringed smoke-stacks, leave the oily smoothness of harbour to face the crashing seas and freezing spray of a north-easterly gale, watched them rise to the crests and disappear unto the troughs until they dwindled to mere specks, until drift and darkness swallowed them up.
Harland/North Riding, 1951
THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT 
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