Qualla: Staithes

Staithes: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dave Hitchborne, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1745, a sixteen-year-old farmer's son from the moors named James Cook came down to Staithes to apprentice himself to a grocer and haberdasher called William Sanderson. He stood behind a counter for eighteen months, weighed out tea and tobacco, watched the cobles pull in and out of the harbour, and decided that retail was not going to be his future. He bound himself instead to a Whitby shipowner and went to sea. The shop where Cook had wasted his time was eaten by a storm tide around 1850; some of its timbers were salvaged and built into Captain Cook's Cottage on Church Street, where they still are. The village he ran away from is a tighter, stranger, more enclosed place than Whitby - and that is precisely why he had to leave.

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Image: Dave Hitchborne | CC BY-SA 2.0

Staithes: A Cleft in the Cliff

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rob Farrow, CC BY-SA 2.0. Staithes is wedged into a narrow ravine where the small Staithes Beck cuts the coast. Two long breakwaters protect the harbour from the North Sea swell. High cliffs rise immediately behind the village - Cowbar Nab to the north, Penny Steel to the south. The old village, the part ...

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Image: Rob Farrow | CC BY-SA 2.0

Staithes: Eighty Boats, Then None

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrew Bone from Weymouth, England, CC BY 2.0. At the turn of the twentieth century, eighty full-time fishing boats put out from the Staithes harbour. The crews used cobles - a flat-bottomed, high-prowed wooden boat designed specifically for being launched and landed through surf, a North Yorkshire design unlike any other on ...

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Image: Andrew Bone from Weymouth, England | CC BY 2.0

Staithes: Don't Say the Word

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ed Jennings, CC BY-SA 2.0. Among Staithes fishermen, there is a superstition you do not say aloud the word pig. To say it brings bad luck. A fisherman who heard it would refuse to go to sea that day. If you needed to refer to the animal, you used a different word: grecian, grunter, oinker, four-legged crea...

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Image: Ed Jennings | CC BY-SA 2.0

Staithes: The Mermaids' Curse

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Lord, CC BY-SA 2.0. There are also mermaids in the Staithes story. The legend, as told by Robert Brown to the Staithes Study Group in 1924 and published that year in the Whitby Gazette, runs like this: two mermaids came to Staithes; the villagers captured and imprisoned them; they escaped. As one me...

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Image: John Lord | CC BY-SA 2.0

Staithes: The Northern Impressionists

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrew Curtis, CC BY-SA 2.0. From around 1880 to 1914, about fifty painters made Staithes their summer home, working en plein air in oils and watercolour - inspired by the French Impressionists, painting the working fishing village around them. They were called the Staithes Group, or sometimes the Northern I...

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Image: Andrew Curtis | CC BY-SA 2.0