Fitz
speaker
397 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Fitz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And Saltersgate was in the perfect spot for just such a task, on the route directly from Whitby to Pickering, at a lonely high point of the moors, far away from the bustle of town and the watchful eyes of the excise officers. and it certainly is a lonely and desolate spot, surrounded by absolutely stunning landscape.
We drove along Saltergate Bank on our explorations of the area, and I spent my time in the driver's seat clutching the steering wheel as we roller-coasted around steep hairpin bends and hanging out the window with my jaw gaping at the breathtaking scenery of the purple heather-covered moors.
In fact, the Saltergate Inn stood just beyond one such hair-raising switchback, a road feature once known to locals rather fittingly as the Devil's Elbow. Although it's likely not the treacherous nature of the switchback that gave the bend an association with the Devil, but the legend connected to the famous landscape feature that it skirts around.
Driving along this road, we were slightly confused when we came upon a well-kept roadside car park, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. There were no houses or businesses to be seen, nothing for miles in fact, so at first we couldn't make out what on earth it was there for. However, exactly opposite the car park and on the other side of the road is a feature people apparently travel miles to see.
Its official name is the Hole of Horkham, but local legend calls it the Devil's Punchbowl. It's a pretty apt name, the Punchbowl part at least. From the vantage point opposite the car park, it looks like an ancient meteor has punched a crater in the side of the moor. The sides of the concave bowl scooping down into a natural amphitheater 400 feet deep and more than a half a mile across.
Of course, local legend loves to explain mysterious landscape features with all kinds of weird and wonderful tales, and this tremendous dent in the landscape has its very own slice of lore.
The story goes that a giant by the name of Wade was responsible for creating the crater when he scooped up a great fistful of earth during an argument and hurled it in a rage, leaving a massive scar where the projectile impacted the moor. In fact, the Devil's Punchbowl is neither a crater or the work of a giant.
Instead, it's the result of a much more gentle-sounding but equally destructive process called spring-sapping. Over thousands of years, water welling up from the hillside gradually undermines the slopes below, slowly but surely eating away at the rocks and leaving the huge indentation we see today. And it's still nibbling away at those rocks even now.
but that takes nothing away from the mystery and deep history of this stretch of moors. A quick look at Lil's beloved Ordnance Survey maps reveals layers of ancient history all around this area. A Bronze Age earthwork ominously named Gallows Dyke sits at the crest of the Punchbowl. On the opposite side of it, standing stones are marked on the map.
And just a little further out are Cairns, Roman works and the remains of settlements, now all long swallowed up by the Peaty Moorland. And all around Saltergate there are tumuli, ancient burial mounds, some with fantastic names straight out of a fantasy novel, including the Three Tremblers and Mount Misery tumuli.
With such deep history murmuring away beneath the stones of Saltergate, how could there not be ghosts up here? But we must pull ourselves back from these ancient tombs and return to the 17th century, at a time when the crown had just doubled the tax on salt, an extortionate increase, making an essential commodity for the local fishing trade cripplingly unaffordable.
So what else could they do but turn to the black market?
Before tales of smuggling and taxmen became embedded in the Saltersgate story, another older tale was told about a different kind of villain who infiltrated the safe haven of the Moorland Inn, the devil himself.
This legend starts, fittingly enough, on a dark and stormy night, when any wind-blasted traveller crossing the moors would have been wise to seek shelter in the welcoming warmth of a cosy hostelry. Even supernatural beings of the underworld, who just happened to be in the neighbourhood.
But before Beelzebub could take even a sip of his refreshing ale, his cover was blown by a priest who was also seeking respite within the sturdy walls of the coaching house, then known as the wagon and horses. The priest leapt into action, trying to oust the devil with an exorcism, but the devil had been quite looking forward to that ale actually and decided he wasn't going anywhere.
Enter once more the heroic landlord to save the day. Does anyone else get the sneaking suspicion that it was always the landlord relating these stories, and making sure their role as the defeater of evil wasn't forgotten? Hmm?
Anyway, with much bravery and daring do, I'm sure, the landlord somehow managed to trap the devil in the fireplace of the inn with the smoke from a freshly lit peat fire, which meant, of course, that to keep the devil from escaping and wreaking revenge on his captors, they would have to keep that fire burning forever.
I love when stories layer and evolve like this, and it's fascinating seeing the evolution of metaphor from actual devil to the most wicked, evil, mundane thing that 17th century people could dream up. Taxes. But this story does present a bit of a problem.
If The Devil in the Fireplace is the original story, but the inn only opened in 1643 and the doubled salt tax happened around 1696, then that only leaves around half a century for the story to have evolved from devil to excise officer. In the words of the dread pirate Roberts, that doesn't leave much time for dilly-dallying. Of course, 50 years is still a decent stretch, so it is possible.
Or maybe there was an older inn on this same site before. I couldn't find any mention of one, but I couldn't find any historic England references for the Salters Gate either. There is, though, quite a lot of evidence in the immediate vicinity for Iron Age and Roman agricultural settlements and evidence of land use into the medieval. So who knows?
Showing 141–160 of 397 · page 8 of 20
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