Category: East Cleveland
-
Grinding Up Saltburn Bank
These female athletes are grinding up Saltburn Bank in the 2026 East Cleveland Classic cycle race. They look powerful, focused, and gloriously free. In the 1890s, those same faces would have been handed a medical diagnosis. Doctors called it “Bicycle Face”. Victorian critics insisted that women’s “delicate” bodies were simply not built for the bicycle.…
-
Skinningrove: Facebook History and Other Unreliable Gossip
Yesterday’s descent of Hummersea Cliff into Skinningrove. Terraced houses cluster around Kilton Beck where it meets Cattersty Sands. Rocky breakwaters hold back the North Sea, which is doing its level best to reclaim the shore. The wooden shoring in the foreground is losing an argument with coastal erosion. Will this be the first instance of…
-
Lewis Hunton: The Boy Who Read the Rocks
Stand on the site of the old Loftus Alum Works and you feel rather small. These 213-metre cliffs are not pretty. For centuries, workers burned shale and processed aluminium sulphate here, poisoning the ground so thoroughly that almost nothing grows. The place looks dead. It seems more of the remains of the seeping pits and…
-
Lieutenant Wilfred Littleboy: Remembered on the Day he Fell, 9 October 1917
No one can say for certain whether young Wilfred Littleboy ever scrambled down the steep bank to cross the new bridge over Skelton Beck and wander into Old Saltburn, with its whitewashed cottages huddled beneath Cat Nab and the gaiety of its fairground by the sea. It is difficult to picture a spirited boy resisting…
-
Along the Howl: Echoes of Old Marske
Marske can justly claim to be among the oldest settlements on the Cleveland coast. The lonely tower of St Germain, with its small cemetery, stands upon ground that has been holy for some fourteen centuries, the first church being raised there in the Saxon age. For many generations, worshippers from Redcar and Coatham made their…
-
The Parched Pond of Margrove
Two swans drift across the shrunken waters of Margrove Pond, looking strangely out of place in a wetland that has seen so much reshaping and had so much optimism. This 18-acre site, given to the Cleveland Wildlife Trust in 1993, lies on land once called “The Carrs,” a name that simply meant swampy ground. The…
-
The Lingdale Mine Disaster of 1953
On this day in 1953, Cleveland suffered its worst ironstone mining disaster. At Lingdale Mine, an explosion claimed the lives of eight men. The blast was sparked when the flame of an acetylene lamp ignited gas released by a rockfall deep underground. The morning shift had been underway when the fall occurred, 180 metres below…
-
How to Dress in the Water—Edwardian Advice from the Shoreline
Cattersty Sands looked perfect this morning. The sun was out, the beach was almost empty, and the North Sea glittered like it wanted to be inviting. It was not. Nobody so much as dipped a toe in. I had half expected to see someone bobbing about in neoprene—open-water swimming being all the rage now. Not…
-
Huntcliff: A Roman Lookout Lost to the Sea
It’s been a lovely day at the seaside, but I my eyes were drawn to Huntcliff Nab, the huge beetling cliff that towers over Saltburn. It’s made of soft shales and is slowly being worn away by the sea and wind. I imagined what the headland would have looked like almost two millenia ago, when…
-
The White Maid of Kilton Castle
The British Cycling Championships descended upon East Cleveland today, bringing to mind a project I embarked upon during the days of Covid: transcribing the works of Richard Blakeborough. Among his tales, “The White Maid of Kilton Castle” holds a special place, for it is set in the environs of Brotton, the very spot where I…