We can leave the woods by a path leading near Lord Normanby's modern
castle, and come out on to the road close to Lythe Church, where a
great view of sea and land is spread out towards the south. The long
curving line of white marks the limits of the tide as far as the
entrance to Whitby Harbour. The abbey stands out in its loneliness as
of yore, and beyond it are the black-looking, precipitous cliffs ending
at Saltwick Nab. Lythe Church, standing in its wind-swept graveyard
full of blackened tombstones, need not keep us, for, although its
much-modernized exterior is simple and ancient-looking, the interior is
devoid of any interest.
The walk along the rocky shore to Kettleness is dangerous unless the
tide is carefully watched, and the road inland through Lythe village is
not particularly interesting, so that one is tempted to use the
railway, which cuts right through the intervening high ground by means
of two tunnels. The first one is a mile long, and somewhere near the
centre has a passage out to the cliffs, so that even if both ends of
the tunnel collapsed there would be a way of escape. But this is small
comfort when travelling from Kettleness, for the down gradient towards
Sandsend is very steep, and in the darkness of the tunnel the train
gets up a tremendous speed, bursting into the open just where a
precipitous drop into the sea could be most easily accomplished.
The station at Kettleness is on the top of the huge cliffs, and to
reach the shore one must climb down a zigzag path. It is a broad and
solid pathway until half-way down, where it assumes the character of a
goat-track, being a mere treading down of the loose shale of which the
enormous cliff is formed. The sliding down of the crumbling rock
constantly carries away the path, but a little spade-work soon makes
the track firm again. This portion of the cliff has something of a
history, for one night in 1829 the inhabitants of many of the cottages
originally forming the village of Kettleness were warned of impending
danger by subterranean noises. Fearing a subsidence of the cliff, they
betook themselves to a small schooner lying in the bay. This wise move
had not long been accomplished, when a huge section of the ground
occupied by the cottages slid down the great cliff and the next morning
there was little to be seen but a sloping mound of lias shale at the
foot of the precipice. The villagers recovered some of their property
by digging, and some pieces of broken crockery from one of the cottages
are still to be seen on the shore near the ferryman's hut, where the
path joins the shore.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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