September 2020

John Leland’s description of Hull in the 1540s is thorough for the time and, indeed, later travelogue writers may have used his information as much as discovering new stuff for themselves. As well as noting the points made in blog 2 he described the town walls in considerable detail, including the section along the Humber […]

Just off the coast and at the north end of Whitley Bay is St. Mary’s Island and lighthouse (technically not an island as it is linked to the mainland by a causeway crossable at low tide, see above). The lighthouse and lighthouse keeper’s cottage have been a tourist attraction since the early 1990s, the lighthouse

On the opposite side of the road to Blyth to the Caravan Park is Whitley Bay’s municipal cemetery (North Tyneside Metropolitan region). This is a very well kept cemetery but nevertheless with clear biodiversity objectives, these achieved by having the main access paths tree-lined (not sure what species of tree but at a common height

As promised, the first of three blogs on the above interrupting the run on Descriptions of Hull. The picture above, taken this morning, shows the sandy upper beach and rocky lower beach at low tide, taken from the promenade at the north end of Whitley Bay leading to St. Mary’s island and lighthouse (see later).

Like his monarch a few months later (Leland didn’t make clear the dates of his descriptions so am making an assumption) Leland travelled to Hull form Beverley although, unlike Henry VIII, he detoured through Cottingham. His initial comments on Hull show but a vague knowledge of Hull’s history ‘The towne of Kingeston was in the

In 1985 the East Yorkshire Local History Soc. published a booklet edited by Donald Woodward and entitled Descriptions of East Yorkshire: Leland to Defoe. Dr. Woodward extracted the descriptions of Hull from various travel writers across the two centuries, in some cases also extracts on the rest of East Yorkshire and, as in the case