are the highest on the
Yorkshire coast. The waves break all round the rocky scaur, and fill
the air with their thunder, while the strong wind blows the spray into
beards which stream backwards from the incoming crests.

The upper course of Staithes Beck consists of two streams, flowing
through deep, richly-wooded ravines. They follow parallel courses very
close to one another for three or four miles, but their sources extend
from Lealholm Moor to Wapley Moor. Kilton Beck runs through another
lovely valley densely clothed in trees, and full of the richest
woodland scenery. It becomes more open in the neighbourhood of Loftus,
and from thence to the sea at Skinningrove the valley is green and open
to the heavens. Loftus is on the borders of the Cleveland mining
district, and it is for this reason that the town has grown to a
considerable size. But although the miners' new cottages are
unpicturesque, and the church only dates from 1811, the situation is
pretty, owing to the profusion of trees among the houses, has
railway-sidings and branch-lines running down to it, and on the hill
above the cottages stands a cluster of blast-furnaces. In daylight they
are merely ugly, but at night, with tongues of flame, they speak of the
potency of labour. I can still see that strange silhouette of steel
cylinders and connecting girders against a blue-black sky, with silent
masses of flame leaping into the heavens.

It was long before iron-ore was smelted here, before even the old
alum-works had been started, that Skinningrove attained to some sort of
fame through a wonderful visit, as strange as any of those recounted by
Mr. Wells. It was in the year 1535--for the event is most carefully
recorded in a manuscript of the period--that some fishermen of
Skinningrove caught a Sea Man. This was such an astounding fact to
record that the writer of the old manuscript explains that 'old men
that would be loath to have their credyt crackt by a tale of a stale
date, report confidently that ... a _sea-man_ was taken by the
fishers.' They took him up to an old disused house, and kept him there
for many weeks, feeding him on raw fish, because he persistently
refused the other sorts of food offered him. To the people who flocked
from far and near to visit him he was very courteous, and he seems to
have been particularly pleased with any 'fayre maydes' who visited him,
for he would gaze at them with a very earnest countenance, 'as if his
phlegmaticke