Ravenscar

A resort that never was

Ravenscar has streets laid out in 1896 for a seaside resort that was never built. The roads are here, and so are the sewers, laid out for terraces and a cliff-top esplanade that never got built. Developers had bought the headland for houses, shops, hotels and formal gardens, and got as far as a few holiday homes before the scheme failed; the company went bankrupt some years later. What survives is a dispersed, quiet hamlet on a six-hundred-foot headland at the southern end of Robin Hood's Bay, with views that run for miles around the sweep of coast.

The scars give the place its name: hard rock layers that run out to sea, from the Old Norse word for a cliff or rocky outcrop.

Food on the headland

The hotel from the resort scheme is still where you go to eat and drink. Grand Villa Heights, long known as Raven Hall Hotel, sits on the cliff top with a restaurant and bar. The kitchen cooks over a rotisserie, a grill and a wood-fired pizza oven, using produce from its own fields and kitchen garden. Cask ales come from across the North, alongside northern lagers, cocktails and wine. One July guest, Darren P, wrote simply, "Restaurant, food was superb," and singled out the brisket ragù. The sea views come up in nearly every account.

For daytime food there is the Ravenscar Tea Rooms at Station Square, where the order is tea and cake, and the National Trust visitor centre café, which does hot and cold drinks, ice cream, cake and savoury snacks. The café shares its building with a second-hand bookshop, and dogs on short leads are welcome inside. The centre is reached by steps; a Tramper can be booked in advance for Fridays.

Getting here, setting out

Ravenscar is signposted off the A171 between Whitby and Scarborough, and a bus runs from Station Square direct into Scarborough, about nine miles away by the Cleveland Way and the practical town for a day out.

Most people come to walk. The easy circular from the visitor centre is 2.3 miles, or 1.4 if you cut it short, crossing the golf course and passing Bluebell Wood and a pond where children can look for frogs and damselflies. Adders bask in the warm patches, so watch the path. Longer routes build from here: the six-mile Ravenscar Round, and a strenuous eleven-mile circuit to Robin Hood's Bay and back along the Cleveland Way. The Cinder Track, the old Scarborough-to-Whitby railway that closed in 1965, runs straight through the village and gives a relatively level, easier route, south towards Hayburn Wyke and its waterfall on a pebble beach, or north to Robin Hood's Bay.

Industry, church and wildlife

The headland's other history is industrial. The Peak Alum Works began around 1650 and operated intermittently until 1862, burning shale for nine months before leaching it. Urine was added to the liquor, and a floating egg told the workers when the concentration was right; at its peak the industry needed roughly two hundred tonnes of it a year, some shipped up from London and Newcastle. A little to the south-east, four building shells remain from a radar station put up in 1941 to watch for shipping.

St Hilda's, a nineteenth-century church holding a good reredos, now has a small gallery attached where local artists show their work through the summer. Grey seals haul out along the coast below, and the colony is monitored closely; if you find them, keep ten metres back, put dogs on leads, and let them be.

A trail for younger explorers

Children who finish the two-mile countryside trail, rubbing its ten plaques as they go, collect a stamp and a sticker at the visitor centre.