The spire of St Oswald's is, among other things, a daymark for shipping, visible far out along this stretch of the North Yorkshire coast. It stands about a mile inland, on the ridge above Sandsend, high enough to be seen from the water, and it is the first thing you meet coming up Lythe Bank from the east. Arrive from the west and a bend and a screen of trees keep everything hidden until the sports-ground entrance, so the whole village appears at once.
Lythe is small and tightly packed, its plan more or less what the Ordnance Survey drew in 1857. The A174 runs straight through the middle, east down the bank to Sandsend and Whitby, west toward the coastal villages. Many of the houses belong to the Mulgrave Estate and share the same dark-green doors.
The Lythe Community Shop at 10 High Street is run by volunteers and combines shop, café and Post Office. Visitors have come out with jams and chutneys, bread, homemade cakes and quiche.
The village pub, The Stiddy, is between tenants and closed long-term. It was the Red Lion once, long enough ago that the bus stop still carries the old name. Inside there are wood-beamed ceilings, sash windows and a tiled floor, waiting for whoever takes it on next.
What you come to Lythe to do is walk. The village green is the start of a 7.3-mile circuit through the Mulgrave Estate, about three hours, past the remains of two castles in ancient woodland before it reaches the cliffs. The estate belongs to the Marquess of Normanby, and its waymarked routes were laid out by Lord Normanby himself: the four-mile Guard House Way to Runswick Bay, the five-mile Foss Mill Crossing, and the nine-mile Mulgrave Way between Sandsend and Glaisdale. The Cleveland Way runs through the parish at Sandsend, though a stretch of the coast path is currently diverted onto a signed woodland alternative while its steps are repaired.
The estate is the reason the walking is what it is. Its 377 hectares fill the steep parallel valleys of Sandsend Beck and East Row Beck, all rocky glens, rushing water and cascades. Humphry Repton produced a Red Book for it in 1792, and wanted the approach to the house to "display the beauties of the place and excite admiration, without terror." The present hall carries work by John Soane; the ruined old castle keeps a medieval keep, bailey walls and a gatehouse.
St Oswald's rewards a closer look. It was largely rebuilt in 1910 by Sir Walter Tapper and reopened the following autumn, but Saxon fragments survive in the tower, and a permanent exhibition, opened in 2008, displays the church's Anglo-Scandinavian funerary stones — ninth- and tenth-century carvings, among them a hogback. They mark this out as an important Viking-period burial ground, though whether a church stood beside the graves that early has never been proved. Inside there is a linenfold oak door, a carved boss over the porch, and arcade piers that alternate round and octagonal.
By 1086 the Domesday surveyors found six households here, one plough team and six acres of meadow, and valued the whole place to its lord at five shillings and fivepence, down from a pound twenty years before. Around 1100 the church was granted to Nostell Priory; in 1499 Rector Thomas Artas left money for a new aisle and a three-bell tower.
The real prosperity came later, from alum. Works opened at Sandsend around 1607 and at one time employed 150 men in what Historic England calls Britain's first chemical industry. The burnt-shale quarries north of Sandsend bridge are what remains.
Sandsend and its beach are a mile down the hill; Whitby and its abbey about four miles further on, with the nearest trains on the Esk Valley line. But the walk most people remember starts back at the green, where the estate woods begin and the sound of the A174 falls away.