In general tourist traps like this are best avoided by sensible people, but The
Bay has enough going for it to be worth visiting regardless.
What the Robin Hood connection is nobody seems to know, but what you do have is
a quite stunning collection of houses perched one above the other on the steepest
possible street all intersected by connecting passageways and ginnels.
Fortunately tourists' cars have to stop in the car park at the top of the hill so
while the place may be overrun by gawping grockles at least you don't have to worry
about being run over.
At the top of the hill you have a collection of guest houses and a couple of small
hotels, and a bigger pub with a nice conservatory. The views are good, and this
is as far as some folk get when they see how steep the hill down is.
At the bottom of the town you have the "Bay Hotel", the official end of Wainwright's
Coast to Coast walk where on an evening you can often spot tired "coast to coasters"
having a celebration meal and a pint. The shops at the bottom of the hill are a
bit rundown, which considering the number of visitors they have to cater for is
inexplicable. There's another two pubs in the old town, the Dolphin and the Laurel.
I've eaten in both while camping nearby, and while it aint haute cuisine it's good
honest pub grub. There's a chippy at the bottom of the hill which has enormously
long opening hours, and when I last went a pair of young lads in charge who delighted
in verbally abusing the customers. Hopefully they're history now because the fish and chips
were good and there's but the one chippy in the village.
From the side of the chippy there's a gentle(ish) footpath up through the woods
which leads to a really good campsite above the village. Just dwell on that for
a moment. A quiet child friendly campsite with a footpath directly down to
a largely pedestrianised village. That's a pretty safe environment for a family
holiday. It's even better now they've invested in a new ablution block in the big field. It does get full though, so if you're going in high season book in advance. There's another couple of campsites nearby,
but they're further up the hill so it's a long way to walk off the beer on an evening.
The Beach
Last year I spluttered my Sunday morning cuppa all over the dining room carpet when
I read a travel article in one of the Sunday broadsheets describe Robin Hoods Bay
as having a fine sandy
beach. If you're looking for sand, look elsewhere. The beach
is pure rock backed by high cliffs. The cliffs are eroding as you'd expect, but
that's quite a bonus as this is one of the UK's top fossil hunting grounds. Even
the most casual browser will find an ammonite or something. The beach is impassable
to the North, but when the tide's out you can walk all the way to Ravenscar passing the Youth Hostel at Boggle Hole as you go. If you plan on stopping at the Youth
Hostel be sure to book as it's a favourite with school parties, and it's on the Cleveland Way and it's on the Coast to Coast.
You can also walk along the cliff top to Ravenscar along the old railway track;
so along the beach when the tide's out and back along the tops after poking round
Ravenscar is the classic walk round here.
Ravenscar
Now Ravenscar is my kind of place, an absolute gem packed full of interest. In the
middle ages Alum was mined and refined here. You can wander round the remains of
the old Alum works, set in the heather and gorse of the hillside. As it's owned
by the National Trust now everything's been infoboarded and the footpaths are all
in good order.
As you walk up to the village from Robin Hoods Bay you come to the NT shop with
Ice Creams and the usual stuff, which is just below the Raven Hall Hotel. The hotel
is quite something with battlements on the cliff top and gardens blasted from the
cliff face. It has a lot of history which I won't bore you with, except to mention
that George III was treated here for his insanity. It's used as the venue
for very posh weddings, but accommodation is actually quite reasonably priced and
I shall report back if I get round to finally staying there this year. They have
a bar where they happily serve beer to passing walkers and a few tables to sit round
outside, but if you want to sit in the garden they do charge for that. And I almost
forgot to mention, they have a quite ridiculous looking golf course set among the
cliffs.
Moving just on from the hotel is the rest of Ravenscar which is really rather silly.
A whole new seaside resort was laid out by developers in the early years of
the 20th century when the Whitby to Scarborough railway was being built. The roads
and the sewers were built and are still there, but only a handfull of buildings
ever went up. Perhaps this was because this is one of the windiest places on the
coast being 200m above sea level. Still, ever cloud has a silver lining, and one
of the few buildings to go up is now a tearoom where you can sit outside on a nice
day.
The railway is long since closed and has been turned into a cycle path/bridleway.
But be warned, flat it is not. There's a long slow climb from Whitby to Ravenscar,
and even more of a climb from Whitby towards Robin Hoods Bay. You can hire bikes
just outside whitby at High Hawsker, where a very friendly man fixed my daughter's
bike after the seat post collapsed. The one great disappointment is that the railway
tunnel at Ravenscar is now closed and you have to cycle round. It probably just
needs a bit of pointing, but it's far easier for those who would have us live our
lives encased in cotton wool to close it than put it right. I mean, it's only a
hundred and twenty years old and the Victorian's did know a bit about civil engineering.
Not like today when the public sector build stuff and then knock it down thirty
or forty years later as being unfit for modern usage. And not only do they demolish
perfectly serviceable buildings, they rebuild them on PFI contracts (that's the
never never to thee and me) which at some point is going to come home to roost.
I feel sorry for whoever has to pick up the pieces of this sorry debt fuelled
economy of ours after Gordon ("my middle name is prudence") Brown steps down.