Port Mulgrave

A Harbour Built for Ironstone

The harbour at the bottom of the cliff is a ruin, and you look down on it rather than walk into it. Port Mulgrave sits on the clifftop between Staithes and Runswick Bay, a short row of houses above scarred cliffs, with the broken piers of its old harbour visible on the shore below. The mine entrance is still there too, about fifty feet above the high-water mark. This is a place built for one purpose that no longer exists.

The settlement is mid-nineteenth-century, which is young for this coast. Thomas Seymour and partners bought the mineral rights in 1854, and for a while the place was called Rosedale by the Sea before the Marquis of Normanby formally opened Port Mulgrave in 1857. Ironstone came out of the cliff, ran through a tunnel to the Grinkle mine inland, and was carried down to the harbour by narrow-gauge railway to be shipped out, some of it to Jarrow. When the miners moved to Grinkle after 1875 the port stayed on as the outlet. The ruins on the shore are what remains of all that traffic.

A Table on the Clifftop

For eating, the address to know is Restaurant Number 20, which occupies the former Ship Inn. The building has been a pub, then a tearoom, and is now a twenty-four-cover modern British restaurant run by Sue and Jason Davies, Sue front of house and Jason at the stove. There is an open kitchen and a Josper charcoal grill, and the strength is fish and shellfish. Dishes have included local-crab linguine, white crab with raw fennel, turbot, halibut, monkfish, local sea trout, and among the meat a Galician sirloin and lamb cutlets, finishing on panna cotta, chocolate truffle cake or a Basque cheesecake. The Good Food Guide called it a "small, simple but outstandingly good restaurant."

Beyond the restaurant, the village keeps almost nothing, and the useful errands happen a mile or so inland at Hinderwell. R Lyth has been the butcher there since 1930, run by Richard with James managing, and its sausages have won awards; the shop uses North York Moors honey from beekeepers said to be half a mile up the road. There is a fish-and-chip shop on the High Street doing cod, haddock and battered sausages. Hinderwell's church, St Hilda's, was rebuilt in 1773 on a medieval site with Saxon origins, keeps a Norman pillar piscina and an organ brought from Selby Abbey, and has a holy well in the churchyard from which the village took its name; the water was once thought to cure eye complaints, and drew pilgrims.

Two Pubs Inland

Two pubs sit within easy reach. The Fox & Hounds at Dalehouse has two bars, an open fire and a woodstove, a sun terrace over an eighteenth-century stone bridge, and, in the owners' own words, is "free from televisions, juke boxes, fruit machines and bad language." The kitchen does Whitby whole-tail scampi, slow-cooked venison, braised pork with cider and Dijon, and a shortcrust steak pie. The Badger Hounds in Hinderwell has a real fire, quiz nights and live music.

The Cleveland Way Above the Shore

The walking is the reason to stay. The Cleveland Way runs along the clifftop, with Staithes a mile north and Runswick Bay two and a half miles south, and a four-mile circular from Staithes Bank Top loops out to Port Mulgrave and back through fields, woodland and Dalehouse in about two and a half hours. It is proper cliff walking: steep climbs, steps, stiles and two crossings of the A174, with dogs kept short near the unfenced edge. The path down to the beach itself is dangerous after landslips, and the National Trust asks visitors not to use it, so the shore stays a thing you look at.

Blackthorn and the Lasting View

Whitby, nine miles off, has the nearest railway station. But the settling image of Port Mulgrave is the blackthorn on the clifftop, where the National Trust has put up nest boxes for tree sparrows.