Qualla: Runswick Bay

Runswick Bay: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paul Buckingham, CC BY-SA 2.0. One night in 1682, two mourners sat up with a body at a wake in the old village of Runswick Bay. They felt the floor shift under them. They felt it again. They went outside, knocked on doors, dragged neighbours from their beds - and watched the rest of the village slide off the cliff into the North Sea. Not a single person died. Every house, almost, was lost. The villagers rebuilt slightly to the south, terracing their new cottages into the cliffside in tight switchbacks, with one car-impassable road at a one-in-four gradient. Runswick Bay is what they built. It is still there because it has continued to fight, with seawalls and engineering reports, against the same slope that swallowed its predecessor.

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Image: Paul Buckingham | CC BY-SA 2.0

Runswick Bay: A Crescent of White Sand

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike Kirby, CC BY-SA 2.0. Five miles north of Whitby, Runswick Bay is two kilometres of pale sand wrapped between Cauldron Cliff to the north and the headland of Kettleness to the south. From above - from the Cleveland Way that runs along the cliff - the village looks like a child's painting: red pantile ...

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Image: Mike Kirby | CC BY-SA 2.0

Runswick Bay: The Hob in the Cave

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mick Garratt, CC BY-SA 2.0. Around the edge of the bay are sea caves, and the largest of them is called Hob Hole. A hob, in North Yorkshire folklore, is a household spirit - sometimes helpful, sometimes a nuisance, related to the boggarts and brownies of older mythology. The Runswick Hob was said to live in...

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Image: Mick Garratt | CC BY-SA 2.0

Runswick Bay: The Painters of 1880

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit mattbuck (category), CC BY-SA 3.0. In the late 1880s, around the time when French artists were colonising the fishing villages of Brittany and Normandy, an English equivalent emerged at Runswick Bay and neighbouring Staithes. Around fifty painters - the Staithes Group, sometimes called the Northern Impressionists ...

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Image: mattbuck (category) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Runswick Bay: The Hectare Holdings

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Director General of the Ordnance Survey, UK, Public domain. Most of the village land is still owned by the Marquess of Normanby's Mulgrave Estate, just inland at Lythe - the same family that has held Mulgrave Castle for three centuries. The 620 hectares of village include 1,875 permanent residents within the wider parish of Hinderwell, bu...

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Image: Director General of the Ordnance Survey, UK | Public domain

Runswick Bay: Always the Slope

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frances Elizabeth Wynne, CC0. The cliff that ate the old village in 1682 has not stopped moving. The geology here is Jurassic shale and clay, soft and saturated, prone to slip whenever the rainfall is heavy enough or the sea persistent enough. Up the coast at Kettleness, alum was mined from 1727 to the late 1...

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Image: Frances Elizabeth Wynne | CC0