Yesterday with the family, I had a really nice afternoon and early evening out in Whitby North Yorkshire. We parked up at the usual place on the West Cliff and walked down to Sandsend beach to have a look at the coastal erosion of the glacial till down there. It changed considerably from several months ago and in one part of the cliff a whole 50 m section had slid from the top to the bottom. Really good! Whilst inspecting the cliff I found a rock of reddy brown sandstone which I am pretty sure is Penrith sandstone all the way back from the Permian geological period when the Eden Valley was all sand dunes and windblown rock because the UK at that time was roughly at the same latitude as the Sahara. The red in the Penrith sandstone indicates that there was little vegetation to take out the iron oxide hence leaving the sandstone coloured red the gorgeous colour I was looking at yesterday and is still in my rucksack because I have forgotten to take it out. We reckon that at the glacial speed of 1 m a day it would have taken around 240 years for that rock to travel from Shap to Whitby. I would have loved to have been there to see that journey.

Outside of the very exciting erosion features of the glacial till cliffs I also spotted a genuine Shap Granite which today is dug out from a quarry near Shap in Cumbria just off the M6. I have seen and read about these in my geology books but it is very exciting to find them in the field. What is it doing in Whitby! This rock was plucked out possibly from a cliff by a glacier which then took it over the Stainmore pass, where the present-day trans-Pennine route the A 66 goes, it then descended into the Vale of York and turned right to head down the Vale obviously moving towards Whitby and when the glaciation retreated around 10,000 years ago it deposited the nice little rock beastie that I saw yesterday. There is also a Shap Granite in the Museum Gardens in York which I'm pretty sure was found there many years ago and has been left as a lovely reminder of our geological and glacial past. I was talking about this rock to my family in the Gardens about a year ago and one of the Museum curators who was a geologist walked by and said it was really unusual that somebody knew what that rock was. I just glowed!

An interesting point about the movement of the glacier up and over and down the Stainmore pass is that you would not think that a glacier can go uphill but indeed they can it all depends on the height of the mountains it comes from and when all this ice just pushes into the valley before the Stainmore pass it eventually just rides up and over it a physical feature seen even today where there are glaciers. I have just thought that this could explain the very steep gradient of the West side of the Stainmore Pass as the glacier just dug into the uphill section and then forced the ice up.

Fiona was fairly fit and feisty yesterday and even though after about 2 miles she started to feel woozy an ice cream picked her up which was good, a very normal response when she is fit, and we walked down to the East jetty of Whitby harbour and joy of joys saw 2 Eider Ducks which I was pretty sure I would see but not within the harbour I thought I would see them about half a kilometre outside of the harbour in the open sea where there are mussel beds for the Eiders to dive and feed off and then surface to swallow them whole whole including the shell. They must have very good digestive systems! The two we looked at appeared very content!

As a sign of Fiona's continuing walk to health she strolled up Whitby steps in a moderately good time! Miles ran up them. However, she did look pretty wasted at the top! We then walked to the urban dwellings on the east side of the River Esk and went through a residential bit of Whitby I had never seen before a mixture of public and private housing all of which were in really good shape, lovely gardens and very nice. A lot of the public housing looked like it had gone into private ownership. A very nice part of Whitby!

By then even though I wanted to walk up and around the road bridge at the top end of Whitby, Fiona was getting quite hungry for fish and chips which we had at Hadley's which is our usual place of repose and food at teatime in Whitby. The food was really good as usual and the service courteous and fun. After this we did a swift mile walk back to the car everybody was in high spirits and good fettle and it was back home to 2 episodes of Star Trek as well as some of the fudge that Fiona insisted on buying. She bought seven pounds worth of fudge yesterday the little piggy but then again we get to enjoy some of it as well! Another great time out with my beautiful family.