Bridlington and Scarborough

Today we got off to a bit of a late start: Celia wasn’t feeling 100%, so I drove into York to meet my nephew, who was up on business, and had offered to take some of our excess baggage home. Thought I wasn’t going to find the place we’d designated as a meeting point, but suddenly at the last minute it was there.
In the early afternoon we drove to Bridlington, a seaside town, because we’d been feeling landlocked and were missing the sea. The place was still fairly busy, although it’s well past the holiday season. On the spur of the moment we decided to move onto Scarborough, and that was more impressive altogether. A really pleasant looking town, probably about the same size as Dunedin, from what we could gauge while standing inside the old castle up at the top of the city. Like Dunedin it has great stretches of beach and sea extending away from it in both directions, plus plenty of fishing boats, and all the usual conglomerate of British seaside towns. But it has more style than many of those, and has obviously been a prosperous place in its time - maybe it still is.
There has been some sort of lookout on the site of the castle since long before the Romans came; they were merely one of many to make use of it. Now all that’s left is a long wall, and the ruins of the keep. The Chapel has long gone (it was almost on the cliff edge) and the only ‘modern’ building is the master gunner’s house (now the tea rooms).
The Roundheads destroyed a lot of the old castle - they seem, like Mao Tse Tung’s Red Army, to have had little inclination to do anything else but destroy. Their legacy of destruction is everywhere throughout the land.
The thing that remains is the sense of space, and the wonderful vista in every direction. I don’t know how high the castle area is, but certainly ít seems far above Scarborough’s town and above the ocean.