Well, you can’t go to Bempton without having fish and chips can you?
We did have an Eccles cake with a cup of tea before leaving Bempton though, that walking stuff can be quite demanding when you don’t have all the right gear. It also gave us time to look at the Tree Sparrows. House Sparrows are in decline, but the Tree Sparrow is doing even worse – you rarely see them these days unless you are at an RSPB feeding station.
Tree Sparrows at Bempton
Once in Scarborough I took some pictures of the castle. That reminded me of the last time it saw action – 16th December 1914. Not bad for a place that was originally built as a signal station by the Romans in the fourth or fifth century. It was, according the write-up, a favourite place for King John to stay. Richard III was the last King to stay there and it held out for Henry VIII during the Pilgrimage of Grace. Finally, it was reduced to wreckage by a Parliamentary siege in 1645. The Royalists produced siege coins.
I didn’t need to mention siege coins, but I find them quite interesting, and if I can’t ramble in my own blog where can I ramble?
I expereimented with the camera settings. Some are quite subtle. One isn’t.
After that it sort of pottered around crumbling and, by 1914, hosting a Coastguard Station.
That day in 1914 two German Battleships emerged from the early morning mist and opened fire. Five hundred shells were fired, eighteen people killed. It could have been a lot worse, though not for the eighteen and their families.
There is a list here, if you are interested.
A U-Boat shelled the town in September 1917, but that is hardly ever mentioned. Three people were killed and five injured. Compared to some of the air raids happening at the time, killing 836 and wounding 1,982 in a 12 month period, the submarine raid was almost inconsequential. These were aeroplane raids, the Zeppelins having sustained too many losses to continue, but not before killing 557 and injuring another 1,358.
Sorry about all the stats and death, but after reading John Knifton’s posts on aircraft crashes and Clare Pooley’s mention of wartime damage to Bungay church, I’ve started thinking how violent history has been in some parts of the country.
Here are a few other photographs – a police box, a sea mine and a ship that went to Dunkirk. Violence, always violence…
(Near the lighthouse there’s a Vickers 13 pounder Naval Gun, the Naval version of the field gun the Royal Horse Artillery uses for firing salutes at state occassions. This one was raised from the wreck of the Hornsund in 1982, 65 years after it was torpedoed. I admit, I didn’t want to walk the extra distance to the far end of the harbour.)
It was a hard life in the Merchant Navy.
And that, apart from buying some cheap reading glasses and photographing a gull, was the end of the day.
Thanks for the mention, Simon. 🙂
It was an interesting post, ad I am now better informed about building with flint.
🙂
I was only in Scarborough a fortnight ago and missed all this, except the fish and chips and the castle. Aren’t there some photos missing?
Yes, and they are playing hard to get when I try to reload them.
We have a Scarborough in Maine, by the sea, too. And I have been to your Scarborough when I stayed in Whitby. Those fish and chips look so good. I could have some right now.
Chips were good, peas were good, fish was good, company was good and we ate it whilst looking out to sea. The batter was a bit iffy, but apart from that, no problem. 🙂
Catching up with you and Julia this time was impossible, so I am diving in again. Glad to see you are still alive and well, Quercus! 🙂
I am sorry to hear your tree and house sparrows are in decline.
Alive and well and practising being a grunpy old man…
It’s good to see a tree sparrow. We have had one in the garden this year so far.
They are always good to see.
My garden is full of tree sparrows, they consume huge quantities of seed!
I have always thought the story of the bombardment rather strange. Why Scarborough!
They say the Germanswere after a RN Wireless station, but I think it was just because Scarborough, Whitby and Hartlepool were in range.
Of course you can ramble on your own blog. And look what interesting paths it takes us on. I hadn’t known about that bombardment either
Violence is what we do best! It’s what’s put Mankind where it is today.
Yes, it’s one of the constants throughout history. I’m amazed how much of it can be compressed into one small town.
That bombardment is interesting. I had not heard of it. The castle would make a good B&W shot, I think. There are lots of places in the Americas called Scarborough. One was memorialized by Stan Rogers in The Scarborough Settler’s Lament: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNS4u9b7U4U
Excellent song. I didn’t know there were other Scarboroughs, though it shouldn’t be a surprise as I know of other place names that travelled. Consulting Wiki also shows that Newark, New Jersey and Peterborough, Ontario are more famous than the originals.
Always interesting to discover namesake towns.
Virginia is a trove of British Place names, Norfolk, Fairfax, Roslyn, Richmond. Other names, like Scarborough occur elsewhere. In Illinois, where I are up, there were a lot of French names, mostly pronounced quite differently than their place of origin, as the French were quite active there in the 16 and 1700’s.
We have massacred a lot of French place names in our time too, as they brought them after the conquest.