Sandsend
Sketches
Richard Bell’s nature diary, North
Yorkshire, Wednesday, 3rd September 2008
WE’RE IN LUCK - with low tide
around mid-day, we’re able to walk along the beach from Sandsend
to Whitby and
return the same way in the afternoon. A morning coffee stop at Whitby’s
North Beach Café
and an afternoon tea stop at the Sandside
Café, Sandsend (where the old portacabin has
been replaced by a larger timber cabin) gives me the opportunity to draw
the cliffs of Sandsend Ness,
which were nibbled into by alum shale
mining over a period of 2 or 3 centuries until the alum extraction industry
moved to the coalfields in the nineteenth century.
Alum salts are used as a mordant
(a fixative) in dying cloth. Alum was once so sought-after that one
author (see tomorrow’s diary)
has suggested that it might have played a part in bringing about one of
Henry VIII’s marriages and, in a roundabout way, have been a factor in the
trial that led to Charles I’s execution.
