Runswick Bay

Down the hill to the rebuilt village

The road into Runswick Bay stops before the village does. Cars are left at the top, by the upper car park, and the last of the descent is on foot: a steep lane down to a cluster of cottages stacked tightly against the cliff. At the bottom is the beach, about a mile of sand curving round to the headland at Kettleness. Locals, for what it is worth, leave the "w" out of the name.

The village you walk down into is not the one that stood here in 1682. In that year, the story goes, the whole settlement slid into the sea overnight, and nobody was killed because the villagers were gathered at a wake and felt the ground begin to move. What stands now was built afterwards, with the compressed, improvised look of a place put together on a slope by people who could not spread out. The Thatched Cottage near the shore — two storeys of local stone under thatch, with bowed upper windows and a four-panel door — dates from the late eighteenth century, part of the rebuilding rather than a survivor of it.

There are two pubs, one at each end of the walk. The Royal Hotel sits down among the footpaths and cottages, family-owned, with exposed stone, old fishing photographs on the walls, a real fire and a terrace facing the water. It pours cask ale — Black Sheep has been the long-standing choice, though lately only through the summer — and recent menus have run to fish and chips, haddock chowder, prawn tagliatelle in a cream sauce, whitebait with garlic mayonnaise, moules marinière, scampi and a noodle stir-fry. Dogs are welcome. In 1890 the licence was held by a man named George Johnson, so the house has been trading for well over a century.

Food from shore to upper village

Up on the Cleveland Way at the top of the village, the Runswick Bay Hotel does homemade Yorkshire pub cooking with a longer reach than most: dressed crab, scallops, skate wing, salt-and-pepper squid, tuna steak and Thai green curry, then lemon posset, crème brûlée, a brie tart, a Snickers cheesecake and brownie-topped waffles. It keeps two changing cask beers and offers dog-friendly rooms. Recent guests describe it as newly renovated, with a separate gluten-free menu, staff mindful of cross-contamination, and a labrador called Ted known to hold the floor.

For coffee and something quick, Tides Beach Shop and Coffee Bar opened at Cockpit Hill in 2023. It does espresso, crispy bacon sandwiches, paninis, filled bagels and wraps, salad boxes and cakes, plus Yorkshire-made scoop ice cream in sixteen flavours and a seasonal soft serve, with a little indoor seating and more outside looking towards Kettleness. Both areas take dogs. Runswick Bay Catch, on Hinderwell Lane, is the sit-down option, a small seafood kitchen cooking fish landed at Redcar, lamb off the North York Moors, Nidderdale duck and locally reared pork and beef; plates here have run from Swahili prawns and Thai fishcakes to Bakewell tart. The Tea Gardens on Ellerby Lane, said to be run by Ann, keep things simpler — homemade cakes, scones, egg mayonnaise sandwiches and more Bakewell tart.

There is no butcher in the village itself. The nearest is R Lyth in Hinderwell, a mile inland, family-run since 1930 and now in Richard's hands. It makes award-winning pork sausages, a pork, leek and black-pudding version, caramelised-onion beef burgers and marinated meats, and sells honey from bees kept about half a mile away.

Beach days and paths through time

The beach is the reason most people come. It is broad and sandy at low water, sheltered by its own curve, and its 2025 bathing-water classification was Good; The Sunday Times named it Beach of the Year in 2020, partly for how little has been done to it. The Cleveland Way runs straight through the village and out across the sand — where the tide allows — before climbing the cliffs. Those cliffs are worth slowing down for. They expose the shales of the Whitby Mudstone Formation and are known for their ammonites, and the beach is a recognised fossil-hunting spot, though the rule is to take only what has already fallen loose, to keep clear of the cliff face, and to watch the tide.

Families have more than the sand. The Runswick Bay Beach and Sailing Club, an RYA training centre run by volunteers, holds Family Sailing Saturdays and youth courses — Juniors for eight-to-thirteens, Cadets for fourteen-to-eighteens — with the sensible proviso that children be water-confident and at least eight. Beginner sea-kayaking sessions launch from the bay through the East Barnby Outdoor Centre. RNLI lifeguards patrol the beach daily from 11 July to 6 September in 2026; outside those dates, do not assume lifeguard cover, and a change of flag is worth checking for.

For a walk with a story in it, take the Cleveland Way north to Staithes: four and a half miles graded fairly easy, about three hours. It climbs out of the lower village past Hob Hole — a tidal cave once believed to house a healing sprite, where mothers brought children with whooping cough and spoke a charm to it — and on across Lingrow Cliffs, past the remains of the Kettleness alum works that ran from 1727 to 1871, and down to Port Mulgrave, where a small harbour built in the 1850s once shipped ironstone along a narrow-gauge line until 1917. If that is too much, the Miles Without Stiles route from the upper car park is a level 1.2-mile there-and-back on compacted aggregate and grass, with a bench and a wide view. South, the same trail carries on over the cliffs towards Sandsend and Whitby.

The crews and painters of Runswick

Runswick has saved lives off this coast for a long time. An RNLI station opened in 1866, and its crews had brought in 199 people by 1934. The coxswain in those years was Robert Patton, who had joined at sixteen in 1904, served in minesweepers through the First World War and helped in the 1914 rescue of the Rohilla. In February 1934 he went out to a sinking steamer, the Disperser, to lift off a lame man and was crushed in the attempt; he died of his injuries and was given the RNLI Gold Medal posthumously. That September the Princess Royal came to the village and, before a crowd of more than five thousand, named the new lifeboat after him — Robert Patton, The Always Ready. Patton's own father had served twenty-seven years as second coxswain.

The RNLI moved the station out in 1978, but the village would not be left without a boat. In 1980 the residents resolved to fund their own, and in the summer of 1982 the first of them, Claymoor, went into service; the Coastguard formally recognised it in 1991. The boats since have carried names that read like a village roll — Christine Appleton, Lady Normanby, Enita Margaret, Spirit of Runswick, Freebird Fojt, and, since 2020, Spirit of Nagar. It remains an independent charity, crewed by volunteers and paid for by donations, community fundraising and occasional grants.

Painters found the place early. From the 1880s a loose association of artists worked around Runswick, Hinderwell and Staithes — not a school, they always insisted, with no leader and no single style. A Whitby Gazette writer put it more warmly in 1902: "the paintable bits about Staithes and Runswick are illimitable." George Weatherill, the "Turner of the North," married a Runswick woman and painted a family at work on the beach here in 1845; the Pannett Gallery in Whitby holds Florence Hess's On Runswick Beach and Ralph Hedley's A Runswick Washerwoman. Elizabeth Blackadder painted the bay in 1962, and that watercolour now hangs in the British consulate in Istanbul.

Coast connections and village memory

Staithes, at the northern end of the coastal walk, makes the obvious day out, and its museum holds some four thousand objects covering fishing, mining, Captain Cook and the local painters, Runswick among them. Whitby is six miles south, with the abbey, the museum and the Pannett Gallery. Getting to any of it means the A174 coast road and the turn at Hinderwell; the last stretch down into Runswick is steep, and the lower village is on foot. Arriva's X4 and X4A buses stop at the Runswick Bay Hotel and run the coast to Whitby, Staithes, Saltburn and Middlesbrough. The nearest railway is at Whitby, on the Esk Valley line.

Above the chapel — the small Methodist one from 1829, built, the village will tell you, by its own women, and now somebody's house — there was a spring that the village drew from until mains water reached it in the 1950s. That is recent enough that the people who carried water up these lanes are barely a generation from the people who own the cottages now. On a still evening, with the tide out and the light going, you can stand on the terrace of the Royal and watch the beach empty of everyone but a couple of dogs and the last fossil-hunters climbing back up for their tea.