A sign on the Cod & Lobster reads "In rough weather please use the other door." The pub sits at the very edge of the harbour, in a seafront position, and the sign is not decorative. Waves have destroyed the front of the building three times, most recently in 1953, when bottles floated away on the tide. It is still there, still serving, with a fire going in cold weather and a patio on the seaward side where you can sit and watch the thing that keeps trying to knock it down.
To reach it you leave the car behind. Staithes drops into a tight ravine where the beck meets the sea, hidden from the newer settlement on the plateau above until the road tips over the edge and the harbour appears all at once beneath you. Cars are not allowed in the old village. You park at Bank Top, postcode TS13 5AD, get change from the Co-op for the pay-and-display machine, and walk down. The descent is steep, and the climb back up is just as steep. Cowbar Nab rises on one side of the harbour mouth, Penny Nab on the other, and the old town packs itself into the gap between them: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stone and brick houses, painted or rendered, with pantile roofs and sash windows, threaded by lanes so narrow they have names of their own. Dog Loup, one of them, is about eighteen inches wide, and the National Park calls it the narrowest street in northern England. Gun Gutter and Slippery Hill are close by. As the North York Moors National Park describes the townscape, sea, land and buildings "unite to form an inseparable whole."
The Cod & Lobster leans hard into what it has. The kitchen is seafood-led, running to a cod-and-lobster main with potato rosti, spinach, samphire and bisque, a seafood kebab of prawns, salmon, scallops and fish, seafood chowder, a monkfish fishcake, shellfish linguine, fish pie, mussels and oysters. There are four cask beers, with Black Sheep Best Bitter and Timothy Taylor Boltmaker among the regulars. A short way up on High Street, the Royal George is the smaller proposition: a late-Georgian building, Grade II listed, with coal fires, a sheltered garden at the back and a food list built around local crab sandwiches, homemade steak-and-ale pie, and fish and chips. Theakston Old Peculier and Lightfoot are the cask beers to look for. One visitor said the place "oozed character," which is the sort of thing people say about pubs, though in this case the building genuinely earns it, with its canted bay and quasi-Doric front forming part of the listed streetscape.
Up at Bank Top, where the walking parking is, the Captain Cook Inn is a larger inn than the other two in the village, with nine rooms if you want to stay above the bar. It was the Station Hotel once, before the railway closed, and was refurbished in 2014. It carries up to five real ales including a house beer, Northern Navigator, brewed for it by the North Yorkshire Brewery, and the kitchen runs to mussels, steak pie, parmo and cottage pie. Muddy boots are welcome, which suits the Cleveland Way walkers passing the door.
The fourth pub asks for a walk. The Fox & Hounds sits about fifteen minutes away in the wooded valley at Dalehouse, with two bars, an open fire, a wood-burning stove and a rear sun terrace over an eighteenth-century stone bridge. It makes a point of having no televisions, jukeboxes or fruit machines. The food runs long and unfussy: whole-tail scampi, king prawns with chilli, garlic and noodles, cottage pie with mature Cheddar, venison, braised pork with cider and mustard, slow-cooked beef with Yorkshire pudding, liver and onions, Cumberland sausage, macaroni cheese. Before she played for England, the footballer Beth Mead pulled pints here to pay for her football boots. The publican, Irene Ward, remembered her simply: "Customers liked her."
For provisions and a bit of gluttony, the village keeps more than its size suggests. The Whitby Crab Company works out of Bank Top, landing fish and shellfish from a family that has fished this coast since the sixteenth century; the fisherman John Cole traces the line from his great-grandfather's coble Prosperity to his own catamaran Mainstay, and at peak the operation dresses more than a thousand crabs a day, supplying kitchens as far as Whitby's Magpie Cafe. Excelsior Fisheries does cod, haddock, fishcakes and battered sausage with chips and curry sauce. There are cafes and bistros through the old town — Cobbles does pizza alongside its cafe and bistro service, and Coastal Kitchen, Sea Drift, Portside and Dotty's Vintage Tearoom all trade in the lanes. Betsy & Bo sells sweets, chocolate and deli food; Reyt Good Fudge sells exactly what it says. The Co-op at the top provides general provisions.
The village has been drawing painters for well over a century, and it still shows. Staithes Gallery hangs contemporary work inspired by the North Sea and the moors. St Peter's Arts and Crafts, in a former school and church on Church Street, shows the work of around twenty local artists and makers, with church services still held there once a month. The museum has craft shops attached selling local textiles and ceramics. During the annual Staithes Festival, cottages and other spaces across the village open as temporary galleries, with music, talks and walks; the dates move each year, so it is worth checking the programme before you plan a trip around it.
Most people come for the coast, and the coast is generous. The Cleveland Way, the 176-kilometre National Trail marked by an acorn, runs straight through, following Cowbar Lane, crossing the footbridge and climbing out past High Street and Church Street towards Port Mulgrave. That hamlet is about a mile off, with the ruins of an ironstone-export harbour below its cliffs and a shore where fishermen's huts have been assembled from flotsam and jetsam. The signposted Staithes and Port Mulgrave circular is four miles, moderate, and takes roughly two and a half hours, climbing hard from the harbour to the cliff path and returning through fields and woodland by Dalehouse; the steep descents and climbs matter more than the modest mileage. For more, the Boulby Cliffs circular runs about six miles with some 227 metres of ascent and reaches Boulby Cliff, at 203 metres the highest point on England's east coast, passing old quarries and a blacksmith-made sculpture by Katie Ventress of a miner at a bait table. Runswick Bay lies about two and a half miles along the Cleveland Way, though the waymarked walk between the two settlements is measured at four and a half; the bus makes an easy return for one direction. Saltburn is around eight miles further along the same trail.
The harbour that all this circles was a working one first. Fishing employed more than three hundred men here in the nineteenth century, working wooden cobles after herring — the "silver darlings" — and there was a local habit of naming houses after the family boat and painting them in its colours. Today a handful of boats still go out for mackerel, lobster and crab. Around them ran harder industries: alum works at Boulby from 1680 for about a hundred and seventy years, feeding the dyeing and tanning trades; jet mining that boomed until Queen Victoria stopped wearing mourning jet; ironstone that the Grinkle railway carried to Port Mulgrave from 1875. A directory counted fifty-three businesses in the village in 1864, among them shoemakers, bakers, a cooper, a wheelwright and a cartwright. The railway that arrived late in the century brought visitors and artists and hastened the changes that undid the old trades; it closed in 1958, and the viaduct above the newer settlement is the largest thing it left behind.
The village's most-repeated name belongs to someone who did not stay. James Cook, born at Marton in 1728, came to Staithes at sixteen to work as assistant to a grocer, William Sanderson, before moving on to Whitby in 1746 to apprentice as a seaman. His teenage counter-work is why the inn at the top carries his name; his later voyages carried both real achievement in navigation and lasting harm to the Indigenous peoples they reached, a legacy the National Park does not pretend away. The painters came later and stayed longer. George Weatherill was the first known to paint the place, and between roughly thirty and forty artists formed the Staithes Group around 1900, pulled in by the fishing community, the light and the cliffs. Among them were Laura Johnson, later Laura Knight, and Harold Knight, who worked here between 1896 and 1907 and shared a studio at the beck mouth. It was the artist Thomas Barratt who set Johnson off, writing to her in 1895: "Go to Staithes! There is no place like it in all the world for painting!"
Families do well down at the water. Staithes Museum, founded in 1993 in a restored former Methodist chapel, holds more than four thousand objects covering fishing, alum, ironstone, the lost railway, fossils, the artists and Cook; admission is by donation. The National Park's geocache arts trail, playable by app or booklet, threads clues about Laura Knight through the village. The small sheltered beach at Seaton Garth is good for sand, rock pools and fossils, provided you watch the tide and the cliffs and do not treat the coast's fossil reputation as a guarantee. Children may recognise the harbour and beach as the setting for Old Jack's Boat, the television series with Bernard Cribbins and the dog Salty.
Getting here means the final approach is on foot. The nearest stations, Whitby and Saltburn, both need an onward bus or taxi, and the Arriva X4 and X4A link the village with Middlesbrough, Saltburn, Loftus and Whitby along the A174 above. Whitby is ten or eleven road miles away.
On Easter weekend the Cod & Lobster holds a fundraising auction for the lifeboat, whose station has stood at Cowbar for more than a hundred and fifty years. The first boat, the Hannah Somerset, launched in 1875 on money left by Hannah Yates, and in the years since the crews have saved lives and lost their own doing it. It is the kind of thing a village keeps up quietly, year after year, at the pub with the reinforced door.