East Pier - Whitby

Well this is the East Pier which lies under Whitby Abbey, a storm thrashed sea on the 18th December, LS's birthday wish for an early morning walk. The streets are empty and the sea is magnificient, the pier itself has great slabs of pavement stone in shades of browns and creams. We had gone down Henrietta Street to find the smoke house for kippers a small shop with the smokehouse behind and a very strong smell of kippers, they are delicious but do tend to smell the house out. Jugged kippers with bread and butter is the way to eat them. Edie the butcher who has a small shop down from where my daughter lives also smokes his bacon here - completely different from supermarket 'smoked'.

Storms seem to be the flavour of the weather at the moment, we delayed our journey back on tuesday, came back wednesday, and now another storm has raged through the night in Essex.

Henrietta Street is mostly cottage holiday homes, smartish and expensive, though I must admit would not like a great crumbly cliff at the back of our cottage.... It was a memorable walk on the pier, as waves washed across the path and the early morning sun which rises behind the Abbey tinged the world. The two piers make a very safe harbour for the boats, the water so still on one side and the great thrashings of the sea on the other. Whitby has this gift of showing what life was like for the hundreds nay thousands of sailors that sailed into this safe harbour and those that did not make it. There is a photo in St.Mary's, of a sailor wearing the first cork safety life jacket, the sailor was the only one to survive out of a crew of 12 when they went out to rescue a boat that had come aground.

Henrietta Street leading to the East Pier

Rough Seas off the Pier

Again

It seems an age since I wrote anything on the computer, mostly because the small netbook we took up did not work most of the time and I must admit a holiday from the computer screen is well worth taking, especially when this computer UPDATES, which this one has and has now lost all my old settings though apparently I can restore back but it is all a bit of a worry.