Robin Hood’s Bay

I had a very restless night. It’s perhaps the change of season coupled with today being 14 years since our eldest daughter died. Therefore it was good to get out for a brisk 5 mile walk. We drove the few miles back to Ravenscar where this time we headed north on the Cleveland Way towards Robin Hood’s Bay, the village we could see from our wild camp last night.

It was warm and sunny though the path taking us downhill through deciduous woodland was quite slippy. As we neared the badly eroded cliffs we stopped to inspect a derelict alum works. The alum had been mined from the hillside above and after processing (this needed vast quantities of human urine) the “flour” was transported by boat around Britain and also exported. North Yorkshire was rich in this raw material needed for tanning hides and in the textile dyeing process. An interesting by-product was Epsom Salts.

We didn’t manage the 10 mile round to Robin Hood’s Bay (just seen in the distance, similar to Staithes) as we needed to press on to our next stopping place, so at a farm about half way we took the single track road very steeply uphill till we reached the cinder path, a walking and cycling track which had been made from a disused railway line. This led us back to our van where we had a sandwich.

I bit the bullet and joined English Heritage as we are intending visiting a few abbeys and they seem to own a lot. The website wasn’t too user-friendly as it said up to 6 children could go free but when I got to the form-filling it looked like they all had to live at my address. Val had sent a code to get a discount so we joined as seniors for £67 a year.


We drove round the outskirts of Scarborough and took the busy road via Pickering to near Helmsy. We turned off at Beadlam up a single track road for a few miles to our CL site at High Farm, £15 a night with electric hook up, water, and waste disposal. It was so warm we were able to sit outside with a coffee.

Tomorrow we must hunt out some abbeys to make the new investment worth it.