A family story, a shooting in the woods, a murder trial, a mysterious death – and four years of research in the archives of North Yorkshire One of the pleasures of working with an archive is discovering that the most interesting family history stories are the ones that start and end with questions that are left unanswered... Sometimes you get a photograph, a name, a date and a family story. Then you start pulling at the threads – and discover that the story is simultaneously

From the Staithes Museum Newsletter, June 2026. Speaking of poetry this month… Cowbar Nab looks fixed and familiar now, but in the poetry and stories of Staithes it is rarely just a lump of sandstone. It becomes a pulpit, a racecourse grandstand, a weather gauge, and occasionally even a punchline. If you listen carefully, it seems less like a landscape and more like a place that keeps getting re-described by whoever is standing in front of it. ⛪ John Castillo — Cowbar as sacr

From the Staithes Museum Newsletter January 2026 I never met Reg Firth, yet reading Tony Horowitz’s chapter in Blue Latitudes—found for me by Bill Hinchley—was like meeting him through the pages. What comes across most vividly is his deep, personal connection to Captain Cook and to the museum he created in Staithes. Reg was a man of meticulous care and boundless energy. He reconstructed Sanderson’s shop—the place where Cook once worked—as a two-story display, complete with a

From Staithes Museum Newsletter issue 6, for October 2024 One of our most intriguing artefacts has been sparking curiosity among visitors: a charming poster from the Staithes Feast of 1797. Its language, rich with old customs and local games, can be hard to decode. But thanks to a serendipitous find among photocopies of records of Hinderwell baptisms, we now understand how a Skep and Pole trial was performed over 200 years ago. “Some explanation is needed to make this task un