Port Mulgrave - North Yorkshire

 If you haven't yet been to Port Mulgrave, I would highly recommend it, but I must admit that it is a place with a bit of history for me, so I am biased. It is currently not for the faint-hearted (see further below) but I am sure that many of you have hearts that could make the trip. Above is the view down from the clifftops.

I first visited maybe twenty years or more ago, when we spent a week up in the Yorkshire Dales with all the children (so seven of us, I think, properly mob-handed). We drove the hour and a half over to the nearest piece of coast and descended the steep and awkward path about 300 feet down onto the beach. 

Port Mulgrave was actually an iron-ore port for about a hundred years and you can still see remnants of the old workings, where ironstone was brought out from a tunnel in the cliffs. And it is these cliffs which are its current glory, because they are packed with fossils, especially ammonites, and you can always go back up the cliff with as many as you can carry. Here are a few small ones from 2023

Whenever the children went to pick up fossils, there was one iron rule: "You can pick up as many as you like, but you carry your own." There were all kinds of deals being made about who would carry whose, but the rule was the rule. And many a heavy ammonite was abandoned half way back up. 

The special joy of ammonites is that if you get a fairly solid sharp chisel and learn exactly where to hit them, they will open up into two shiny clean halves and you will see something that nobody has seen for 180 million years - the clean and beautiful lines of a spiral creature that swam in our warm seas. And I say 'our seas' as though there is some permanence here, but in fact Port Mulgrave at that time was somewhere close to where Morocco now is, with our continents and masses making their progress around the globe.

We have a lot of the old fossils still sitting on the hearth at home, and some of these will follow me when I move, as a memento of those times, but one in particular will come with me because it was a prize snatched back from fate and time by Cro. 

At the beginning of 2023 Cro was told that all treatment had now failed and that she had a few weeks to live, but out of the blue a final attempt with immunotherapy was successful and gave her an extra season so that the few weeks turned into five months. And in that last stolen season we managed a trip back up to Port Mulgrave, somewhere she had been desperate to return to. We went on the train, with the portable oxygen compressor that gave Cro liberty from Oxygen tanks and we, inadvisably but typically, walked over the cliffs from our lodgings in Staithes, to get to Port Mulgrave on the first day. 

But when we got there we found that the old cranky steep footpath had collapsed in a landslide, so all we had was a 60-degree slope and a long long rope to abseil down. We shouldn't have, but at that point you do. So we did. And it was absolutely wonderful. Hell but wonderful. And we came back up with a pocketful each of fresh ammonites. And this is Cro about half way up the return stretch, knackered but determined. The phrase in the video we posted later was "I wouldn't say we bit off more than we could chew, but it was a bit hard to swallow". But when life gives you an extra chance like that, it would be rude not to. So we gorged, and loved it. And if you do get the chance to go there, pick up  an ammonite for me.