The road through Goldsborough runs out at Kettleness. It arrives at a scatter of houses on a clifftop and stops. The houses are sandstone and brick under red pantiles, with coped gables and sash windows from the early nineteenth century, and beyond them the ground falls away to the North Sea and across to Runswick Bay. The National Park describes the effect of the dead-end road as a "quiet, tranquil feel," which is accurate and much of the reason to come.
There is a reason the houses are no older than they look. On the night of 17 December 1829 the cliff subsided and took the old settlement with it, and the alum house, the staithe and the workers' cottages all went. The village standing here now was rebuilt afterwards, further back from the edge. The alum house was put up again inside the quarry, and by 1831 the works were back in production. A former chapel built in 1872 is now a house among the others.
Construction of the alum works began here in 1727, with production following intermittently, and the quarrying marked everything. The scheduled remains, among the most complete of their kind, include calcining floors, stone-lined steeping pits, a tunnel that carried the liquor, conduits and tanks. The stripped-back coastline shows a working face up to fifty metres deep, brown, orange and grey rock strata, and caves at the base of the cliff. Alum came and went by sea; after 1829 vessels beached in the bay and carts crossed the foreshore on rutways cut into the rock, lengths of which still surface at low tide.
In 1848 the quarrymen dug out something older than the alum: the roughly seven-metre skeleton of a predatory marine reptile, Rhomaleosaurus cramptoni. The original sits in storage at the National Museum of Ireland; the one displayed in the Natural History Museum in London is a cast.
For a pub or a shop you leave the hamlet. The former railway station, on the coastal line that opened in 1883 and closed in 1958, is now Seeonee Lair, an activity centre for Scout and Guide groups rather than passing visitors. For a meal you walk or drive to Runswick Bay, where The Royal looks out over the water. The menu runs to fish and chips, scampi, sandwiches and salads, with changing local specials and, by arrangement for the private dining room, local lobster. There is a beer garden above the bay, water for dogs, highchairs and a children's menu. Lythe, a little further on, has a volunteer-run community shop with a café and Post Office.
Most people come for the walking. The Cleveland Way runs through the hamlet along the cliff edge, the North Sea on one side and Runswick Bay ahead; the wider stage between Saltburn and Sandsend runs seventeen and a half miles, and the coastal sections can be challenging. Shorter circuits link Kettleness with Runswick Bay for the views without the full distance. Down at the bay there is a sandy beach, rockpools at low tide and sheltered water that people swim, paddle and kayak in. The National Park asks you to look at Hob Holes from a distance rather than up close, because the rock above them falls.
Whitby, a few miles down the coast, is the nearest railway station and the practical place for supplies. The coastal bus service stops at Sandsend, Lythe and Runswick Bay, and the last stretch to Kettleness is yours to make.
Bram Stoker knew the place. In Dracula he set it as a dark line on the horizon and had Mina Murray write of "the sun as I write is hidden in thick clouds, high over Kettleness." On a grey afternoon at the end of the road, with the cloud sitting low on the water, it is not a hard sentence to picture.