The ironstone mines, the great cliffs, a mysterious fossil, a very peculiar toilet and a heartbreaking family tragedy: in his autobiography Out of the Old Earth, writer Harold Heslop recalls the extraordinary years he spent as a boy at Boulby, looking out over the sea beyond Staithes. Staithes has always been a place best understood through the people who have lived here, worked here and watched the sea from its shores. Their stories are not confined to the narrow streets of

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

For generations of people in Staithes, Marie Lowden was simply “the Toffee Lady”: the woman on the High Street who made and sold her own crackly toffee. But behind that familiar village memory was a woman who had already lived several lives before she began selling sweets — and who, in later life, became a remarkably prolific published writer. There are some people who become part of a place so completely that their names almost become attached to the landscape. In Staithes,

In this blog post, I'll tell you a bit about my favourite romance in the history of Staithes. The Secret Staithes Diary of Enid Lucy Pease Robinson, edited by James Hart and published in 2010, is a unique first-hand account of life in Staithes during the summer of 1901. Written by a 20-year-old woman from the prominent Pease family of Darlington, the diary was discovered at an auction in West Sussex nearly a century after it was written. The "Secret" Nature of the Diary The j

David Clark’s book, Between Pulpit and Pew, is a study of how religion actually worked in Staithes during the mid-1970s. Instead of just looking at what ministers preached, Clark looked at the "folk religion"—the local traditions, superstitions, and habits that really mattered to the villagers Here are the main ideas he discusses: 1. Official Religion vs. Folk Religion Official Religion: This is the formal stuff—the rules of the Methodist or Anglican church and what the minis