Snakes of stone

2oth August, Whitby, Yorkshire

For the last few days I have been exploring the North Yorkshire coast. It’s not an area I am at all familiar with, but it’s rich in history – both natural and human. Yesterday I walked from Whitby, a seaside town famous for its ship-building, jet carving, whaling and alum mining – to Robin Hood’s Bay, a Victorian smugglers cove. It was a 6 mile hike along a beautiful coastal path. The weather was perfect and the views stunning.

When I arrived, two hours later, I dropped into Wainright’s Bar to re-nourish my joints with a pint of Directors. I then slowly plodded up the steep hill winding up behind Robin Hood’s Bay towards the local bus stop where, I was told, I could catch a bus back to my campsite. But along the way something happened that changed my plans.

I’m not quite sure why I noticed a small sign, posted up on the Church notice board. It wasn’t in the least bit colourful or prominent. It concerned a fossil-hunt, organised by the local geological society, which was to leave from the old Customs House at 6 o’clock that evening. It was now 4.45. After consulting my bus timetable I realised there was no excuse, it was easy to get a later bus back and this was clearly an opportunity too good to miss. Back down the hill I went.

It turns out that Robin Hood’s Bay is famous for its ammonites, spiral shaped fossils dating from c. 170 million years ago. Some of them can be as big as car’s wheel, some as small as 1 penny piece. They went extinct along with so much other land and marine life in the mass extinction that finished off the dinosaurs, 65.5 million years ago.

For centuries the local people believed these curiously-shaped fossils were the remains of a horrific onslaught by sea snakes. This monstrous plague had been turned to stone by God after he answered the prayers of St Hilda (d. 680 AD), Abbess of nearly Whitby Abbey, who pleaded with him for her people’s deliverance.

Rising up high across the bay and towards the top of the cliffs, not so far into the distance, can be seen the remains of the old alum mines, worked since the 1600s. The chemical was a vital ingredient in dyeing wool, a mordant for making the dyes stick to natural fibres. After Henry VIII’s spat with the Pope, local production of this chemical became a top Royal priority to avoid having to import the stuff from its main point of European manufacture, the Papal States.
Here, in the blue shale of these cliffs, the alum was extracted using a most protracted chemical process involving kelp (seaweed) and copious quantities of locally produced human urine, shipped in floating wooden tankers from downtown Newcastle.

It was only today, on a trip to the wonderful Whitby museum, that I finally made the connection between alum, fossils and Darwin. Evidence of giant Ichthyosaurs and ancient crocodiles lunge out of the walls of this gem of a museum. These were fossils found by the alum miners, now painstakingly extracted and re-assembled where they are cemented into place for permanent display.

What I hadn’t realised is that these fossil discoveries were made several decades before Darwin published his revolutionary theory in 1859. They weren’t found by people looking to back up Darwin’s thoughts - that was hardly necessary! Hundreds of tonnes of fossils were already on display in the museums of pre-industrial towns like Whitby for all to see….

It’s largely thanks to the alum miners and Henry VIII that, at least in this part of the world, copious evidence to support Darwin’s theories was already in the public domain, carefully preserved for all to see, if they wished, in national and local museums.

Darwin’s writings forever changed the way people looked at these mysterious prehistoric relics. They were no longer snakes of stone, for so long thought by the people of Whitby to have been a testament to the will of God, but precious evidence of species long since extinct.

I came away realising how completely Darwin challenged people’s traditional perspective on the world. Afterall, at least until 1850s, despite the discovery of fossils, it was commonly believed that the Earth was only about 6,000 years old. So entrenched were these beliefs that I guess it's not that surprising that today, just 150 years after the publication of his theory, some people still find Darwin’s revelations easier to reject than accept.