Robin Hood’s Bay

I’ve just emptied my camera after a busy Summer. Here are some pics, close to home, of Robin Hood’s Bay, North Yorkshire:

Taken from the Beast Cliff at Ravenscar. The village of Bay is under the far end. Note the concentric rings of Jurassic rocks on the shore – a sequence of marine shales uplifted into a dome and then weathered away. The tidal zone is a marine nature reserve.

The name? Robin Hood might have landed here after the Crusades, or he may have sailed from here to defeat pirates – or this may have been  his pirate base. Hood used to be a local name here, and at Hartlepool (up the coast a way).

 

 

My wife’s ancestors fished out of the Bay from 1730 to 1800.

John Wesley trod these yards, garths and ginnels on his way to give rousing open-air sermons.

Smuggling was rife in the old days. The dwellings are so ‘cheek by jowl’ that a bolt of silk and a cask of claret could be slipped into a house on the shore, passed through a wardrobe into the next house, and then into the next until they had been through a hundred houses. They did not see the light of day until they emerged from a house at the top of the cliff. Meanwhile the customs officers would rush around the streets and yards, full of futile suspicion.