Walking Yorkshire

Staithes is a village of two halves. People park at the top half which is the less picturesque, then normally the habit is to descend and disappear into the nooky old fishing village.

But not for us, not yet. After a word with a couple of walkers just finished a Coast to Coast walk and some joshing about sunhats, we headed for the Boulby potash mine. It stands obviously industrial in the landscape a mile or so away.

First there was a back lane, blackthorn one side hawthorn the other, only a runner as traffic and a loss of the sense of sea. A poster advertised welly wanging at Roxby Fair.

Mines Wood was good, here lurks a dark stone tunnel of the clammy cold air of the abandoned ironstone mining. Our track was bright between the trees with verges of pale vetch and fuzzy horsetail with now and then a tall Canterbury bell and sometimes a beck.

Soon a chimney, rumble and hum reminded of the modern mine, seagulls circled the concrete then we lost it again in a landscape of pasture and barley hillocks. The mine is not apparent for most of the walk.

An area was fenced, presumably a hole, a brick shed held a rusting ironstone mine ventilation fan, beware the stepping stones set in concrete, these odds and ends don’t detract, the woods are generally very nice.

There are a couple of places on the walk to stop and ponder the potash mine when it fills the frame but it’s the invisible that is extraordinary. A million tons of the fertiliser are extracted a year and much salt, from a 230 million-year-old seam that’s four thousand feet underground and 7 miles out under the sea.

For a mile we switched to the rising expectation of heading for the cliffs, gave barely a nod to the dark cows and the spinning lapwings. You’ll just miss the trig point at 700 feet on Rock Hole Hill, these are the highest cliffs on the east coast.

The path, the Cleveland Way, runs above a huge scoop out of old alum mining, past Blue Nook and Hole Wyke. The sea shone on the breakers, the sky was clear, the sharp horizon curved. The top half of Staithes was visible a mile of two away, a wedge shape.

Bird watching was limited, some gulls lined the cliffs, others were windsliding. A cormorant or black shag flew past high and straight, these tall dark long necked fish eaters are hard to tell apart. I asked a passing birdwatcher if he’d seen the pair of raptors and he said no, he’d been in Yorkshire a week, from Oxford, and he hadn’t seen any bar a kestrel. The star plant was a bank of escaped rose of a shocking pink.

Sometimes the cliff path is right on the edge, there's a few houses similar, and as we were closing on Staithes we found ourselves puzzled a moment on a tarred promenade, this turned out to be the old road, part fallen into the sea.

At Staithes cascade through the cottages to where the beck meets the sea and there's tea and all.

Done, bar the walk back up to the carpark, good for viewing the hut land of allotments and pigeon lofts.