Trifter

In 1933, the then popular novelist, Leo Walmsley, wrote an article for National Geographic, using the title ‘Between the Heather and the North Sea’, about his adopted hometown of Robin Hood’s Bay and its surrounding countryside. As you’ll see, if you’ve good eyes, he borrowed the title from an earlier writer, Mary Linskill, writing in 1884. I’ve borrowed the title from both of them because it describes the area perfectly. The thin ribbon of cultivatable land, only a few miles wide, that exists between the high moors and the clifftops looks like a permanent green hem on a skirt that changes colour with the seasons — white with snow in winter, olive in spring, purple with heather blooms in summer and russet as the bracken dies back in autumn.

In Walmsley’s time, Yorkshire fishing towns like Robin Hood’s Bay and Whitby, still experienced the annual seasonal invasion of Scottish women who followed, on land, the Scottish fishing fleets’ nautical progress up the coast. The women’s job was to salt the herring boats’ catch, which their menfolk landed at ports along the East Coast.  These families were to return later as part of the annual influx of tourists to the resorts of Scarborough, Filey, and Bridlington. There were other occupations around Robin Hood’s Bay, but they were growing fewer. Jet Stone carving was in terminal decline because, without Queen Victoria in her widow’s weeds setting the style, few people wanted black jewelry, and the local Alum mines were being undercut by cheaper product from overseas.

Fish stocks too were falling, something Walmsley attributed to World War 1 mines and depth charges. After WW2, what remained of the North Sea herring and cod were pretty well wiped out by factory trawlers. The inshore crab and lobster industry also disappeared, possibly due to over-fishing, or maybe pollution. Robin Hood’s Bay settled back into a rural landscape with farming as its principal industry and the area became even quieter in the mid-Sixties because, without fish to move to market or vacationers going to nearby Scarborough, the local railway closed.

By the Sixties, holidaymakers were going abroad and day-trippers became the staple visitors to England’s coastal resorts — boosted by the growth in car ownership. However, for villages without sandy beaches or amusements, like Robin Hood’s Bay at the north end of the bay and Ravenscar on the headland opposite, the future was different. Workers left for greener pastures and artists and retirees bought up their houses. Robin Hood’s Bay became, and remains, an artists’ colony, a St. Ives of the North, while Ravenscar became a retirement retreat. The photo is from the slipway in Robin Hood’s Bay and the house where Walmsley lived is up the alley at the right. I’ve lost my photo of the blue plaque.

The Railway Company that laid the coastal line from Whitby to Scarborough (in Victorian times) originally planned Ravenscar as a seaside resort. The fact the village stands on top of some of the highest cliffs in Great Britain didn’t dim their enthusiasm. They laid out a town and began constructing foundations, roads, and cliff paths leading down to the beach — a ‘beach’ strewn with huge boulders and a wave-swept scar of rocks running out from the foot of the cliffs into deep, treacherous waters.

Developers may not be able to spot the dangers of 600-ft high cliffs but you can be sure every mother who came to look at a show house did. So, in a country where the ruins of abandoned places litter the countryside, the ruins of a town that never was can still be seen in the fields of Ravenscar.

One of the few buildings that did get built, the Raven Hall Hotel, is dramatically perched on the very peak of the cliffs, the ones you see in the photo above looking from Robin Hood’s Bay to Ravenscar. The Raven Hall hotel’s golf course is laid out on the hillside leading down into the bay; it would be an endurance test for a marathon runner. Local farmers also entice money from tourists arriving at Ravenscar, by supplementing their farming income with pony trekking and youth hostelling.

Ravenscar’s an unlikely tourist attraction because there’s nothing there, but it has the best view over the bay in all its many moods, as the photo above, looking over to Robin Hood’s Bay and Ness Point, shows. Whether it’s winter snows lying in the folds of the hillsides that sweep down to the sea, or fog in the bay so solid-looking you think you could walk across it to Ness Point, or just the farms basking in a warm summer sun, this view is one of the world’s best. And Ravenscar does have some claims to fame. It’s the eastern end of the Lyke Wake Walk, a trail that takes you from Osmotherley, about forty miles inland, across the moors to the sea. Legend has it this was the route taken by people disposing of plague victims’ bodies in the 1300’s. Also, Ravenscar lies on the Cleveland Way, a trail that follows the clifftops from the river Tees, in the North, to Scarborough, ten miles south. And recently, excavation and partial restoration of the oldest of the area’s Alum mines and processing buildings gives visitors a glimpse of an industry we never see today.  

The region gained one new, very visible, industry some years ago — filming for movies and TV. The small inland village of Goathland is ‘Aidensfield’ on TV’s Heartbeat, and episodes regularly feature Whitby and occasionally Robin Hood’s Bay. When I visited Goathland in the Sixties, I was probably one of a dozen tourists in a day. Now, thanks to TV, the village gets a million visitors a year. Heartbeat’s spin-off show, The Royal, features the neighborhood as well.

The 1992 Dracula movie, starring Gary Oldman, used author Bram Stoker’s authentic Whitby location for Dracula’s landing in England. The 199 steps from the beach up the cliffs to St. Mary’s church and the stark ruins of Whitby Abbey on the headland, and even a tea shop in Robin Hood’s Bay, are all featured in the novel. More recently still, Possession with Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeremy Northam actually featured the Raven Hall and Robin Hood’s Bay. These newer filmmakers carry on the good work started by an older favorite Yorkshire series, All Creatures Great and Small, which was made a few miles northwest of Robin Hood’s Bay at Thirsk. 

As Walmsley predicted, the sea-faring life of Robin Hood’s Bay is gone; however, the material prosperity of the area has since risen dramatically. He probably wouldn’t see it as an improvement because the old, sturdy, self-sufficiency of the local people has been replaced by an essentially service culture of people who are mainly incomers. It’s somewhat ironic because Walmsley’s most famous novel, Foreigners, records the difficulty he and his family had, as incomers, trying to integrate into the close-knit local community of Robin Hood’s Bay. It was a community he came to love and serve so well, both as an author and as a member of its lifeboat crew.

All images are the author’s originals.