North Yorkshire Coast
I’ve been reading The Moonstone* by Wilkie Collins with my book club the past couple of weeks, and I wasn’t aware until I started reading that it begins in Yorkshire at a house on the coast. Collins doesn’t give a specific location to the house, but I went digging through my digital trove of pictures from around the North Yorkshire coast for pictures that conjured up the atmosphere of The Moonstone to me.
“Our house is high up on the Yorkshire coast, and close by the sea. We have got beautiful walks all round us, in every direction but one. That one I acknowledge to be a horrid walk. It leads, for a quarter of a mile, through a melancholy plantation of firs, and brings you out between low cliffs on the loneliest and ugliest little bay on all our coast.”
I confess to never having really seen an ugly bay on the Yorkshire coast, but this picture taken near Whitby made me think of this description since it has the house and trees, and I could imagine the sea creating quicksand as it moves into the rocky crevices of the cliff at high tide.
Speaking of high tide in Whitby, this is one of my favorite pictures of that phenomenon one December. The North Sea looks ferocious, doesn’t it?
Rocky Cliffs in Whitby
“The sand-hills here run down to the sea, and end in two spits of rock jutting out opposite each other, till you lose sight of them in the water. One is called the North Spit, and one the South. Between the two, shifting backwards and forwards at certain seasons of the year, lies the most horrible quicksand on the shores of Yorkshire.”
Rocky Beach at Robin Hood’s Bay
Runswick Bay
View of Sandsend
I saw some speculation online that Sandsend could be the basis of the town of Frizinghall, but I wonder if it might be better suited as the location of Cobb’s Hole, the fishing village where Rosanna Spearman’s friends live. Either way, when you read The Moonstone one day, here are some pictures to help your imagination along.
I highly recommend a drive along the Yorkshire coast. There are large towns and small, fishing villages, and beautiful walks.
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