The Egg and I

The weather's been so tempestuous that I headed out to the cliffs to see if the nesting seabirds were OK. They looked fine. They've evolved to survive in the teeth of a gale. Brooding gulls and razorbills were sitting tight on their single eggs. One gull's egg was exposed in a grassy hollow just below the cliff edge but the razorbills tuck theirs firmly into crevices on the most inaccessible crags and ledges. However I know that seabird eggs were historically an important part of the diet for coastal dwellers around the Atlantic seaboard, and in some places, the Scottish island of St Kilda for example, a staple food for part of the year with men regularly risking and losing their lives to harvest them. I didn't know though that collecting seabird eggs continued on the coast of Yorkshire until the middle of the last century. Certain families whose land edged the cliffs around Flamborough, Filey and Bempton carried on the custom of 'climming' until the 1950s, lowering themselves over the precipitous 200 foot high rock faces with ropes, pulleys and winches. The eggs were eaten locally and sent to London restaurants. At one time they were also used in the processes of sugar refining  and leather tanning.
There's some information about this  and some wonderful old photographs of the climmers here and here.
And here, thanks to Talpa, are the rings that were used for the ropes, still in situ on Flamborough Head.

I was sorely tempted but I left the gulls' egg alone. The razorbills' were well beyond my climming abilities.