At the old station on the edge of the village, railway carriages still stand by the platform, though the last train left in 1965. The site is now Trailways, a bike-hire and sales shop with a small café, and it sits directly on the Cinder Track — the 21.7-mile off-road route that follows the former Scarborough-to-Whitby railway. From here Whitby is three flat miles one way, its harbour and the clifftop ruins of the abbey waiting at the end; Robin Hood's Bay is three miles the other, though that stretch turns to loose coarse gravel and is harder going. The National Park recommends the village as a starting point for shorter circular rides on the wider Moor to Sea network.
Hawsker comes in two halves, split by the A171. High Hawsker is the older and tighter of the two: sandstone and brick cottages close to the road, pantile roofs, low stone walls. Low Hawsker is more open, its houses set behind gardens along broad grassy verges. The B1447 branches off through High Hawsker towards Robin Hood's Bay, and the X93 and X94 buses run through both halves on the Whitby–Scarborough corridor, though it's worth checking times before you travel.
The Hare & Hounds keeps a separate bar and dining room — a locals' side with dominoes, and a family room with open fires. The kitchen is homemade, with a Sunday lunch and themed nights that rotate through Chinese, tapas and Italian. Meat comes from local butchers, vegetables from local growers, seafood from Whitby fishmongers. Three real ales are usually on, among them Theakston Old Peculier and Theakston Best Bitter, and there is a lawned beer garden with parking. One visitor called it "a really relaxed place."
Down Bottoms Lane, where the Cinder Track runs on towards Robin Hood's Bay, the Coast Cafe Bar at Northcliffe Holiday Park is open to the public: a full Yorkshire breakfast with Sykes Farm bacon and chipolatas, Belgian waffles, grilled-cheese sourdough toasties, Yorkshire-beef burgers and a cauliflower-and-chickpea masala. York House, a Victorian hotel on four acres just off the old railway line, has its own café and bar serving hot food and Sunday breakfasts.
All Saints' was built in 1876–77 to designs by the Whitby architect E. H. Smales, in rock-faced sandstone under a central tower with a steep hipped roof. Inside are a chancel screen, tiled wall panels, two original brass candelabra and a monument to Martha McCausland, who died in 1893. In 2000 it was refloored and fitted with a kitchenette and toilet, and it now doubles as the village school's gym, drama space and music room.
There was a church here long before it. An 1890 county history records that in 1123 Aschetine de Haukesgarth was given Hawsker by the abbot of Whitby, built and endowed a chapel to All Saints, and then became a monk himself; the chapel was gone before the present one was raised. Older still is Hawsker Cross, a headless stone shaft of the tenth century that may once have marked the southern edge of the abbey's estate. The name itself means "hawk's enclosure."
Low Hawsker's Victorian windmill survives only as a shortened tower, put to use at one point as a chemical store. The carriages at the station are still carriages, standing beside a line that no longer runs.