Robin Hood's Bay

From the bank to the Dock

Leave the car at the top. There is no public visitor parking lower down, and driving further is difficult: the pay-and-display car parks at Station Road and Bank Top sit up in the Victorian upper village, and the National Park asks drivers not to continue past the Victoria Hotel. Below that point the road becomes New Road and drops toward the sea at roughly one in three, and beyond it the lower lanes are largely traffic-free for visitors. Steps, cobbles and flagged passages compress between the cottages, and the North Sea appears in framed slices at the ends of the lanes.

King's Beck cut this ravine, and the village crammed itself into the cut. Red pantiles, Welsh slate, tall chimneys and, as a local peculiarity, terracotta surface drains give the roofscape its texture. From inland you would not know the place was here until the ground falls away beneath you and the B1447 tips you down into it.

At the very bottom, above the slipway at the foot of King Street, is the Bay Hotel. Its downstairs room is Wainwright's Bar, named for Alfred Wainwright, whose Coast to Coast walk, traditionally 192 miles from St Bees, ends at this door. Walkers reach it with wet boots and the look of people who have earned a drink. Dogs are welcome throughout, four handpumps run at the bar, and on Friday nights the folk club plays. There is no garden; the draw is the water, a few yards away across the slipway.

A little up King Street, Ye Dolphin is a small traditional inn doing hot food, real ale and cider, and live music, and taking both dogs and children. On New Road, the Laurel is a compact early-eighteenth-century inn, Grade II listed, with a weekly quiz. Down at the Dock, twenty yards from the beach, the Smugglers occupies a seventeenth-century building. Its main room seats twenty-seven; upstairs, under original beams and beside a log burner, a thirty-seat bar hosts live music. They make their own pizzas, the feta and caramelised onion among them, alongside sweet-potato fries and takeaway. Dogs are welcome here too.

Pubs, plates and small shops

Also at the Dock is Brambles, a steakhouse and bistro run by James and Freya, open for brunch, lunch and grills with locally roasted coffee and local ales. Chateaubriand is the centrepiece. Small, well-behaved dogs are allowed.

The two hotel pubs up in the Victorian upper village run to more space. The Loxley, inside the Victoria Hotel, keeps open fires and a menu that names Champagne-batter fish and chips, Sunday roasts, small plates, and vegetarian and vegan dishes. The pub names Timothy Taylor pale ale and a Whitby Brewery ruby ale among its beers and holds Cask Marque accreditation. The Victoria was built in 1897, has thirty rooms, and its Garden Bar and terraces look out to sea. The Grosvenor, a family-run hotel from the late 1890s, has a public bar with a log-burning stove, a pool table, and a kitchen that leans on curry and steak nights and Indian dishes; Wainwright Gold and Timothy Taylor Landlord are the regular casks, with one that changes. Dogs are welcome if they stay off the furniture. Steve Phillips, a founder member of the Notting Hillbillies, plays here.

Provisions divide by altitude as well. In the upper village, Baytown Stores and Post Office is the all-purpose shop: fruit and vegetables, newspapers, logs and coal, home baking and sandwiches, Botham's bread, and the post, cash and banking counter. Trevor and Louise Parker, who run it, also brew Baytown Beer, which produces Baytown Bitter, a Whitby Heritage ruby ale, and a porter called Squire's Connivance. Down in the lower village, Muir Lea Stores handles the basics a self-catering cottage needs on arrival: milk, eggs, bread and buns, welcome hampers, and Botham's cakes and biscuits. On New Road, Bay Fisheries keeps up the village's oldest trade, its specialities listed as local fish, crab, langoustine and lobster.

Then the small shops, which repay slow walking. Dollies has sold sweets since 1927, from jars and pick-and-mix to rock, fudge and ice cream. The illustrator Jessica Hogarth runs a shop of her own coastal cards, prints, tea towels and homeware on New Road; her designs have also sold through Fortnum & Mason, Liberty and Daunt Books. In the Old Bakery on Chapel Street, Berties of Bay revives the local fishing gansey and its knitting patterns; the founder, Matthew, started the label in 2016 with £500 and named it after his cat, Bertie. There is a shop trading Whitby ammonites, fossils and crystals, a toy shop opened in 2019, a jet jeweller, a bookshop, and premises for antiques, art and craft.

Clifftop food and coastal ground

For chips, the cliff-top Fish Box has a patio and a sea view. It is run by the third generation of the Fusco family, and in 2013 it became the first Yorkshire fish-and-chip business to earn Marine Stewardship Council approval. "We know the trawler crew who catch the fish and where the fish are caught," says Stuart Fusco. The Cove, in a converted chapel above the bay, does artisan cakes, homemade food and speciality coffee, with gluten-free and vegan options; Maid Marion's Fish and Chips, Morwen Le Faye's Tearoom and Tea, Toast & Post add to the count of places to eat in a village this small.

The walking is the reason many people stay longer than a day. Northward, the Cleveland Way runs seven miles of clifftop to Whitby, with the X93/X94 bus for the return; a six-mile circuit heads out past Ness Point to Maw Wyke, where kittiwakes nest, and comes back on the Cinder Track, a gentler inland walking-and-cycling route laid along the old Scarborough to Whitby railway. South along the shore, a mile-and-a-half circular reaches Boggle Hole, a wooded ravine with a beach; at low tide the foreshore opens into rock pools among the flat rock platforms the locals call scaurs, and near high tide you take the cliff path instead, because the beach route can be cut off. Check the tide, not the clock. For less mobile walkers there is an accessible out-and-back of about a mile, with gradients around one in ten and broad views along the coast.

The beach itself is Jurassic, its rock between 150 and 200 million years old, and ammonites, belemnites and the curled Gryphaea shells known as devil's toenails turn up loose on the sand. The rule is to collect from loose material only. The cliffs are unstable and are not to be hammered or dug, and a rising tide can cut off a route quickly, so an eye on the water matters more than a photograph.

A bay shaped by trade and tide

The village is older than its Victorian top suggests and stranger than its name. There is no Robin Hood in it: the record treats the name as more likely to come from Robin Goodfellow, a woodland spirit, than from the archer, and the burial mounds above the village, Robin Hood's Butts, are about three thousand years old. John Leland, passing through in 1536, called it "a fischer townelet of 20 bootes with Dok or Bosom of a mile yn length." By 1540, around fifty cottages stood at the shore.

What made the Bay notorious was smuggling, at its height from the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, when duties on tea and other goods were heavy. Contraband came up from the beach through the King's Beck tunnel and moved between the houses along linked cellars and passages. Customs officers were obstructed, sometimes violently, and when the naval press gangs came, the women beat a drum to warn the men. Much of King Street fell into the sea in 1780. Erosion has long been part of the arrangement here: the painter Dame Ethel Walker's Bay house and studio went over the cliff in 1961.

By the mid-nineteenth century the fishing fleet came to 130 men, thirty-five cobles and a handful of herring and lobster boats, with women and children baiting lines and barrelling the catch. Larger trawlers and deeper harbours then took the trade, and inshore fishing had effectively ended by the Second World War. The railway arrived in the mid-1880s and built the upper village; a small lock-up went up in 1886 for drunken navvies, and the line closed in 1965, leaving the Cinder Track behind it.

Stories, churches and the iron fish

The place has kept turning up in books and songs. Leo Walmsley, brought here at the age of two in 1894, fictionalised it as "Bramblewick" in Three Fevers, Foreigners and The Phantom Lobster; Three Fevers became the 1935 film Turn of the Tide. The folk singers Norma Waterson and Martin Carthy, and their daughter Eliza Carthy, have roots here. In 1877 a seventeen-year-old named Margaret Moorsom wrote and illustrated Songs from Robin Hood's Bay by hand at Lancelot Cottage.

Two churches hold the village's maritime record. The present parish church, St Stephen's on Thorpe Road, was built in 1868 to 1870 to G. E. Street's design, Grade II* listed, with a saddleback tower and stained glass by Henry Holiday; inside stands a rough medieval font carried over from the church that preceded it, and bronze memorials to men lost at sea. The older St Stephen's at Raw, from 1821 and now cared for by the Churches Conservation Trust, is a plain Georgian box with box pews, a full gallery and a three-decker pulpit, its walls lined with boards recording lifeboat rescues and shipwrecks. Rare maiden's garlands, paper funeral crowns for young unmarried women, still hang inside. The Trust describes the building as "an old mariner gazing out to sea."

Opposite the Old Coastguard Station stands a cast-iron fish, about waist-high and heavier than most people who walk past it, raised by 1887 to collect money for the lifeboat and thought to be among the oldest such boxes still in use. It remembers a Captain Isaac Mills and his wife, Alice Russell. Children were once told that if you dropped a coin in, its tail would move.