Where has the garden gone?

I was working recently in Scarborough on the North Yorkshire Coast and drove past the end of a street called Holbeck Hill.

Somewhere, deep down in my psyche lurked a fact associated with the address.

It took a bit of mental processing of both good and useless data to tease out the reason for my feeling of deja-vu.

Then it came to me. The Holbeck Hall Hotel.

Bingo, well no. It was much too high class an establishment for that sort of seaside entertainment but it did have the attention of the nation for a week or so in June 1993.

The Hotel had an unrivalled location overlooking Scarborough South Bay, the Spa, seafront, harbour and across to the Castle on the promontory. The 70 metres of ground in front of the hotel were laid out as landscaped gardens above the cliff line. The ambience of the place was reflected in the room rates, amongst the highest in the resort.

A guest, looking out on a fine June 4th morning, noticed that only 15 metres of the garden remained as a feature with the bulk of the land mass having disappeared and the rest beginning to slump and fall away.

There had been strange goings-on over the preceding six weeks with cracks appearing in the footpaths along the cliff top. These had been repaired but as a precaution the Council closed the access points above and below the cliff line. Heavy rainfall in May and early June onto the glacial clay has caused a point of saturation. It was too much for the natural composition to cope with culminating in a huge rotational landslide of the one million tonnes of material.

Likened to a slow motion lava flow the mass spilled out over the cliffs and into the sea forming a large semi circular platform. The Hotel structure was powerless to resist the forces of nature and gradually began to tear apart.

News crews from the UK and a wider world interest documented the destruction of the Hotel in a very voyeuristic way. Updated bulletins over the next few days showed real-time images of the development of cracks and fissures in walls and between elements of the building. There were sights of curtains billowing out of gaping holes and furnishings falling out of what had been windows, doors and full walls.

The four star hotel became part of the equally auspiciously rated tourist beach.

As often happens even after such dramatic occurences the memory of the event has tended to fade.

The former position of the Holbeck Hall Hotel has been stabilised and landscaped and it is hard to comprehend that there was ever a prominent building in that idyllic spot.

A large saucer shaped undulation and the bulge of the coastal path catches the eye as being something unusual. The curious by nature may pull up and park at the nearby Viewpoint and read the information board about what happened.

There have been more recent cases of landslide and soil creep along the East Coast, notably on the steep valley sides above the Esk River in Whitby including a section of the graveyard below the church which was the inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula.

First written under the title of "Slip sliding away"