Scarborough in Yorkshire

Scarborough is located on the eastern coast of Yorkshire which also happens to be the only oceanic coastline the county has.

I chose to describe its location this way because to many Yorkshire people their allegiance to their home county takes precedence over their allegiance to England. That sentiment of superiority was consolidated in the phrase used to describe the county as ‘God’s own country’. This may sound like it has been around for years, decades, centuries and millennia. It hasn’t. It was first mentioned as a headline for a special edition of Country Life published in 1995. The author was Nigel Farndale, a son of Yorkshire.

The town’s name is the result of the conflation of two words. The ‘Scar’ part is a shortened version of the Anglo Saxon word ‘Scear’ meaning a ‘rock’. The ‘borough part is also rooted in the Anglo Saxon language and means a place that is fortified. Scarborough certainly has a big rock at the northern end of the South Bay overlooking the harbour. At the summit of this rock are the visible remains of an old castle whose ancient stones lie on top of fortifications dating back to 2000 BCE.

From the South Beach it is possible to see some of the remains of the fort that was built in the 12th century. It would be intact today if it hadn’t been used as target practice by the Royal Navy during World War I. In my own opinion the naval artillery should have been aiming about a mile to the south about where The Grand Hotel is.

There is evidence of human settlement in the area dating back to 8,000 BCE. Archaeologists uncovered the remains of a Mesolithic dwelling predating The Grand Hotel by ten thousand years.

For several centuries Scarborough bumbled along as a fishing port, a trading harbour and a smuggling area. Then in 1626 a Mrs Farrar discovered a stream of acidic water containing iron that drained into the South Bay. ‘Taking the water’ is something I have never tried but Mrs Farrar saw a business opportunity and tapped into the demand for spa facilities that nearby Knaresborough had already developed.

The giant of travel writers, Daniel de Foe, was on one hand very polite about Scarborough in his travels in the early eighteenth century. He described it as ‘…well built, populous, pleasant and we found a great deal of good company.’ On the other hand, he was a bit of a back stabber about the town when he visited Knaresborough fifty miles into the hinterland of the county.

‘We were surprised to find a great deal of good company here drinking the water, and indeed more than we found afterwards at Scarborough.’

Oh well, even three hundred years ago it was difficult to trust the reliability of travellers’ reviews.

Scarborough holds the world record, set in 1988, for the largest recreation of a page of a comic. The record is based on the front page of the ‘Beano’ and was grafted into the sands just below The Grand Hotel. Sadly it, the comic not the hotel, was washed away by the incoming tide. In 1933 at the harbour a British record, still standing, was set for the largest tunny fish weighing in at eight hundred and fifty one pounds.

Possibly the person from Scarborough who is most deserving of a much wider fame than he already has is George Cayley (1773 – 1857). He is regarded by those within aeronautical circles as the founder of their science without which none of us would be able to jet off to anywhere in the world. He designed a fixed wing aircraft and recognised that for it to fly it had to come to terms with four forces; weight, lift, drag and thrust. He even identified the need for airplanes to have a cambered wing. In his work for aeronautic design and the need for lightness he invented the wire wheel made from steel.

Baronet Cayley, as he later became, was certainly ahead of his time.

Yorkshire people have a stereotypical reputation for tightness with money. They have been described as ‘Scotsmen who have wandered south and on the journey have had all the generosity squeezed out of them’. Like all stereotypes, this one is broad brush in nature and glosses over the exceptions to the generalisation. All of the Yorkshire people I know and have known have been warm heated and welcoming, except for a certain hotel in Scarborough.