Cowbar in Their Words: One cliff, many voices

From the Staithes Museum Newsletter, June 2026.

Speaking of poetry this month…

Cowbar Nab looks fixed and familiar now, but in the poetry and stories of Staithes it is rarely just a lump of sandstone. It becomes a pulpit, a racecourse grandstand, a weather gauge, and occasionally even a punchline.

If you listen carefully, it seems less like a landscape and more like a place that keeps getting re-described by whoever is standing in front of it.

⛪ John Castillo — Cowbar as sacred ground

For the 19th-century Methodist poet John Castillo, Cowbar was not simply scenery, but charged space—where faith, gathering, and landscape collided.

In his account of a Methodist Love Feast held on the summit, he writes:

“From Cowbar’s bright summit that song is aspiring,

Jehovah himself now appears to approve

To fan the dim spark in the cottage expiring,

Or melt the fierce flame of distraction to love”

Here Cowbar is lifted out of geography and into something almost liturgical—a place where sound carries significance and the cliff itself seems to approve what is happening upon it.

🐚 Stanley Umpleby — Cowbar as edible landscape

By contrast, the dialect poetry of Stanley Umpleby brings Cowbar firmly back down to earth - literally. In spring, he sees not sermons or skylines, but vegetation and local knowledge:

“Ah leyke ti gan ti Steease i’ spring

That’s t’ taam shu allus leeaks ’er best;

…An’ t’ silverwhips is oot i’ floo’er”

The cliff becomes a seasonal marker, where the appearance of “silverwhips” signals change, and where knowledge of place is expressed through what grows on it rather than what is built upon it.

🎡 William Francis Verrill — Cowbar as spectator stand

In the early 20th century, William Francis Verrill turns Cowbar into something altogether more boisterous: a viewing platform for village spectacle. He recalls the races and the crowds gathered below:

“Oh I went down to Staithes the races to see

And a man upon Cowbar did stand

I asked him to point out the race course to me

Which he did with a wave of his hand”

Here Cowbar is not symbolic or botanical—it is practical infrastructure. A place to stand, point, watch, and make sense of organised chaos below.

Laura Knight — Cowbar as a shield

For Dame Laura Knight, Cowbar was much more than a geological feature; it was a "rounded arm" reaching out from the north to create the village’s "chaos of shelter". In her autobiography, Oil Paint and Grease Paint, she describes the cliff as a front-row seat to the terrifying power of the North Sea.

She wrote:

"I stood in the shelter of Cawbor once to watch a house go down and see the blocks of stone tossed into the air like pebbles."

Beyond the drama of the waves, Cowbar also represented a different social world to Knight—the "miners’ cottages at the top of Cawbor". She spent a great deal of time there, famously painting Dressing the Children in one of the cottages, even though she felt a "profound assault" from the poverty and "sordid" late-night noises of the village below. To her, the cliff was a barrier that stood between the "endless drama" of the sea and the "giant child’s box of bricks" that made up the village houses

So what is Cowbar, really?

Is it a signpost, sacred elevation, seasonal instruction or front-row seat to disaster? Taken together, these voices don’t agree on Cowbar—and that is exactly the point. It refuses to settle into one meaning because it is never truly the same place twice.

Laura Knight talked about Cowbar as the "protective arm" of the village, but it is a guardian under siege. Far from being a static monument that "never moves," the cliff is wearing away at an estimated rate of one foot per annum. It is a "Passing Shadow" of sandstone and shale that regularly surrenders tonnes of itself to the waves

Cowbar’s poets aren't just describing a landmark; they are racing against time to document a remarkable survivor. The language keeps changing because the cliff itself is shifting, proving that in Staithes, the only thing more relentless than the sea is the human work to make meaning out of the stone.