Qualla: Robin Hood's Bay

Robin Hood's Bay: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Wigulf~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. Local legend insists that during the great smuggling years on the Yorkshire coast, a bolt of silk could be landed on the beach at Robin Hood's Bay and arrive at the top of the village without ever once seeing daylight - passed hand to hand through a network of subterranean passages, secret doors, and tunnels cut between the cellars of houses jammed together up the cliff. The story may be slightly embellished. The village's tangle of alleys, vertical streets, and houses leaning shoulder to shoulder above the bay makes it sound entirely possible. Whether smugglers ever used such a network or not, they certainly used the village. In the late eighteenth century, the small port was a kingdom of contraband.

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Wigulf~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0

Robin Hood's Bay: The Smuggling Trade

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mick Garratt, CC BY-SA 2.0. Tea, gin, rum, brandy, and tobacco arrived from the Netherlands and France, slipped ashore to avoid duty, and disappeared up the cliff into the village's maze. The trade was financed by syndicates ashore, who pocketed the profits while the seamen and villagers took the risks. The...

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Image: Mick Garratt | CC BY-SA 2.0

Robin Hood's Bay: The Visiter and the Lifeboat

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Derek Harper, CC BY-SA 2.0. On 18 January 1881 a violent storm drove the brig Visiter aground in Robin Hood's Bay. The village's own lifeboat could not be launched. The lifeboat at Whitby, six miles away by road, was the only hope. What happened next is recorded on a plaque in the village. Eighteen horses d...

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Image: Derek Harper | CC BY-SA 2.0

Robin Hood's Bay: Ammonites and the Pliensbachian

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DS Pugh, CC BY-SA 2.0. Robin Hood's Bay sits in a fissure between two steep cliffs of Upper Lias shale, capped by Dogger sandstone and Lower Oolite shales. The beach is famous among fossil hunters for the ammonites - coiled, fluted shells of long-extinct cephalopods - that emerge from the foreshore roc...

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Image: DS Pugh | CC BY-SA 2.0

Robin Hood's Bay: The Bramblewick Coast

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Robinson, CC BY-SA 2.0. The novelist Leo Walmsley, born in 1892, was educated in the schoolroom of the village's old Wesleyan Chapel. He renamed Robin Hood's Bay as Bramblewick in his novels - Three Fevers, Phantom Lobster, Foreigners - and the 1935 film adaptation Turn of the Tide was shot on its stree...

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Image: David Robinson | CC BY-SA 2.0