Filey - the best family holiday resort in Yorkshire

Filey Holiday Lettings
Filey holiday cottages, apartments and self catering flats. Late availability deals available.

Filey is a place of many memories for me. It was here as a small child that we always came for our annual Summer holiday to Mrs Barrett's boarding house and sat on the beach all day long come rain or shine. That isn't mandatory nowadays and most of the boarding houses have long since gone but Filey remains an absolute gem.

The town is set afront the magnificent Filey Bay, a long stretch of beautiful sand with Filey Brigg to the North, then Coble landing and a central more commercial developed section and finally to the South the magnificent beach backed by cliffs running all the way down to Flamborough Head. That probably means nothing to anyone who hasn't been there so let's look in some detail.

Filey Town

The town itself is set in the middle of the bay running up and on top of the cliffs. It seems almost caught in a timewarp being gentle without being genteel, retaining much of its character from the holiday peak of the 60's and early 70's. There are no large hotels, but quite a few small ones, tons of holiday cottages and still a good smattering of B&B accommodation. There used to be two cinemas, but one's now a large pub and goodness only knows what the other one is. There's a couple of pubs, but none of them are anything to write home about, a handfull of decent eateries and lots of good chip shops and greasy spoons. I noticed The Star has been refurbished recently and a restaurant added, so maybe that will improve things. The majority of the town is flat and easy, and much of the cliffs have been terraced into gardens, with narrow paths and ginnels everywhere. There used to be a tiny theatre on the cliffs called the Sun Lounge, but that's "The Rendezvous" cafe nowadays doing a fine line in chips with everything.

Parking used to be a nightmare, but the council built a huge car park at the Southern edge of the town and it's all OK now. There's also a big car park to the North on the Brigg, but be warned that both are fanatically patrolled by wardens so don't be tempted to chance it. There's quite a lot of parking directly on the sea front but you have to be an early bird to get it. There's currently a team of three wardens working in Filey, and they are keen as mustard. They seem to believe their job is to drive visitors away and they can routinely be seen with tape measures and digital cameras looking for anyone who hasn't parked quite as neatly as they should. The easiest solution of course would be to get rid of them and use the money saved to introduce diagonal parking on the front. That's unlikely to happen as Filey is ruled by dictat from Scarborough, and it would involve some creative thinking - and we all know not to expect too much of that from Local Government.

For disabled visitors there are a considerable number of spaces right on the front which is great. But wouldn't it be fantastic to have a wheelchair lift of some kind going between the town and the front. Surely that wouldn't be too hard to do in this day and age - and how much more of an attraction would it make Filey for disabled visitors.

Filey Brigg

The North end of Filey Bay is formed by Filey Brigg. This is a headland which has been very heavily eroded on the bay side leaving a wonderful rock platform full of rock pools and the weirdest path imaginable along it. It gets cut off when the tide comes in, but it's not really too dangerous as the cliffs are soft boulder clay and quite climbable. There are paths down the end of the brig and down the side about half way along, but the Health and Safety fascists have erected signs about "No Safe Access".  Both paths are perfectly usable in reasonable conditions by reasonably fit and able people, so don't let the signs put you off. The path down the end is a bit of a scramble so don't try it with pushchairs, toddlers, whingers or granny in a wheelchair. Once you get outside of the bay round the end of the headland it's a very different environment with sheer cliffs and no escape route. If you get caught there as the tide comes in you're in serious trouble.

The North side of the Brigg with its sheer cliffs is quite popular with anglers. They stand on ledges on the cliffs and  fish over the edges. If you're on top of the Brigg you might notice a rope going off the edge. That's where they scramble down, and there's an iron ladder fastened into the cliff to help them. If you look carefully at the picture on the right you can see a couple of them. Wouldn't recommend exploring the area though as it's a bit of a walk on the wild side.

Kids love the brigg for the rock pools along the way, they're shallow, safe and teeming with sealife, and nets can be bought from the nearby shops at coble landing for a couple of quid. Serious sea fishermen can generally be found at the end of the Brigg as can birders. Not quite sure what they turn up to watch but there's certainly plenty of Shags about. There used to be a small cafe at the end of the bridge, but that's now closed and the site is occupied by a bird watching shelter which always seems to be closed. When I visited in June '07 there were about 20 dead Guillemots and Razorbills lying about, plus another couple of very weak ones. Never seen that before and hope never to see it again.

The fields on top of the Brigg used to be farmland, but in the early seventies it was turned into a country park incorporating a camp site. It's also the end of the Cleveland Way, which I walked as a youth and still believe to be the best long distance footpath in the UK. The park has a small cafe and shop, reasonable toilets and plenty of space, but being on top of a cliff it can be pretty windy.

The Beach

The Northern end of the town is marked by a deep ravine leading to Coble Landing. This is a slipway where the local fishermen keep their Cobles. Cobles being small wooden fishing boats which clearly show their descent from Viking longships. There's also some tacky amusements, little huts selling seafood and ice cream, and all the usual tat you expect at the seaside. Every year there's fewer and fewer cobles left, just another unwanted legacy of our membership of the EUSSR. It's never ceased to amaze me that we ceded billions of pounds worth of fishing rights in exchange for absolutely nothing. The type of sustainable fishing carried out by cobles is exactly what we should be encouraging, instead of which the cobles are grounded while the seas are hoovered clean by Spanish factory trawlers.

Heading south from Coble landing you have the main central section of beach which is a dog free zone in high season and is ideal for families. It's such a massive beach it never gets crowded, and is backed by a massive sea wall giving plenty of shelter from offshore winds. At the Southern end of the central beach you get another ravine leading up to Filey's main car park, and at this point countryside begins and the beach is undeveloped, still perfect sand and backed by low cliffs of boulder clay. Walking along here is a treat (dogs allowed) and you can walk all the way down to the great little cafe at Hunmanby Gap and beyond to the end of the beach and the start of the Flamborough Cliffs.

As you head South along the beach there's a fair sampling of WWII vintage pillboxes and even a few rather lovely Art Deco houses among the cliffs. There's also the way up to Primrose Valley, one of those awful Haven holiday camps which just might be worth a visit if you have to entertain small kids. There also used to be a Butlins camp next to Primrose Valley, but that closed in the early 80's. It then fell into the hands of a local "businessman", and after reopening as Amtree Park it closed again six weeks later leaving a lot of people seriously out of pocket. Now, about twenty years later, Amtree Park is finally being redeveloped. It's being turned into a new village of posh holiday homes at very posh prices. They're building about seven hundred homes, plus a hotel, leisure facilities and the like  just at the point where the housing market seems to have peaked. And they're marketing them to property investors. Good luck to them.

Having seen the first few houses of the new Amtree Park go up, it's not to my taste. They're all ersatz local cottage style as if they're trying to create a fake Flamboro, a surrogate Speeton or a couterfeit Cayton. Call it what you will, the houses look utterly twee. Here was an opportunity to create great architecture, to do something really unique,  and instead we've been given a poor pastiche of a local village. I went to have a nosey round the development in mid 2008 and I have to say it's odd. The houses are quite nice, but they come with a clause that only allows the owner to occupy the property for six months of the year. Other people are allowed to occupy it for the other six months, so effectively it means you can't live there permanently. I presume that's designed to stop the council having to build new schools and facilities for residents. As I say the houses were nice enough, and once they build all the shops and the pub (in a fake mediaeval city gateway) it'll be even better,  but as more houses are built the ones now standing may well not have a sea-view anymore. There's also all kinds of restrictions about keeping the place tidy, not allowing any individuality in the gardens, not allowing scruffy boats and stuff like that. Awfully authoritarian and not  to my liking at all, but if you're looking to buy a holiday home to rent out it could be ideal.

Just a word in passing about Hunmanby Gap. This is a way down to the cliffs near the  inland village of Hunmanby. It's constantly in danger of eroding and the cafe is only still there by a miracle, but the food is top scram for hungry walkers. I moaned earlier about the lack of decent pubs in Filey, but if you visit Hunmanby village two miles inland, the balance is redressed with half a dozen truly excellent pubs, all allowing children, serving good beer and decent food. If you just want to explore this area, Hunmanby makes an excellent base. In the centre of the village there's The Buck, The Cottage and the White Swan, down a side street is The Horseshoe, just on the edge of the village is The Railway, and just outside it The Royal Oak. 

Finally as you reach the far end of the beach, there is one magnificent little gem that few visitors ever see. Climbing the steep footpath up the cliffs towards Speeton, you come to St Leonards Church, a tiny Saxon chapel with no aisle. A real little gem, very reminiscent of the chapel on the battlefield at Towton. From here you can walk to the main coast road, have a quick pint at the Dotterel or catch a bus back to Filey.

Filey Bay looking back from Speeton

Editor's note - a fair number of comments appeared here from disgruntled locals and visitors complaining about yobs and anti-social behaviour in Filey. They were starting to overwhelm this page, so I've moved them here. If you want to add to that discussion, please do it there not here.