The old village of Withernsea, no doubt, disappeared in a similar fashion. For the modern town we feel pity more than indignation. It consists of a haphazard collection of ugly lodging-houses, a modern church and a conspicuous lighthouse, whose revolving light glares into the windows of half the houses in the town, making sleep impossible. The place seems consciously at war with the ocean, and gazes ruefully at the remains of its iron pier, a limb that was savagely handled by the sea some years ago. No doubt the frail sea-wall will crumble away before long, and the depressing houses will then follow rapidly. The peninsula formed by the Humber is becoming more and more attenuated, and the pretty village of Easington is being brought nearer to the sea winter by winter. This fact makes the restoration of the church no easy matter, for who would subscribe to a fund for spending money on a building that may follow the fate of Owthorne and a dozen other places? Close to the church, Easington has been fortunate in preserving its fourteenth-century tithe-barn covered with a thatched roof. The interior has that wonderfully imposing effect given by huge posts and beams suggesting a wooden cathedral. At Kilnsea the weak bank of earth forming the only resistance to the waves has been repeatedly swept away and hundreds of acres flooded with salt water, and where there are any cliffs at all, they are often not more than fifteen feet high. Unfortunately, too, they slope downwards inland, so that each yard destroyed by the sea makes the front lower and less effective. The road comes to an end a short distance beyond Kilnsea, and the rest of the way to Spurn Head, marked by its conspicuous lighthouse, visible a long way to the north, is over the rough grass of the spit of hummocky sand which forms the extremity of this corner of Yorkshire. BEVERLEY CHAPTER III BEVERLEY When the great bell in the southern tower of the Minster booms forth its deep and solemn notes over the city of Beverley, you experience an uplifting of the mind--a sense of exaltation greater, perhaps, than even that produced by an organ’s vibrating notes in the high vaulted spaces of a cathedral. The exceptional mellowness and richness of the whole peal of bells removes them from any comparison with the harsh, hammering sounds that fall upon the ear from so many church towers. Peter, the great tenor bell, was probably cast in the latter part of the fourteenth century, and has therefore given forth his sonorous notes ever since the two towers were built.