IN 1812, an old book about the beauties of England and Wales claimed that visitors who found their way along the narrow paths between the cottages of Runswick Bay could enter one house and find themselves looking down the chimney of another. A later book of 1920 suggested the houses clung to the high cliffs like housemartins’ nests.

Yet another writer felt the village was best seen from the railway, although that is no longer there. To all those descriptions we can add that the village of Runswick Bay is probably best observed from the sea, although there are magnificent views of both bay and village from the nearby cliff-top at Kettleness on the eastern side of the bay.

What it all means, of course, is that Runswick Bay, between Whitby and Saltburn, is definitely worth a visit, and if you can time such a trip to when the tide it out, then a magnificent sandy beach awaits. There is a sizeable community on top of the famous cliffs but it is the cliff-face houses that attract most interest. They cling to the high and steep cliff in what seems to be a very risk-laden manner – indeed, over the centuries, several houses have slid down the cliffs into the sea, one of the most disastrous being in 1682 when many cottages were lost to the waves.

We arrived when the tide was out to reveal the dangerous rocks that are concealed at high tide but also a wide bay with a beautiful sandy beach that was surprisingly rich with bird life. The descent into the bay is via a very steep hill, but there is a car park midway with the choice of coping on foot with the leg-aching gradients on the final stretches.

There are lots of benches for visitors and they provide wonderful views, not only of the wide bay and of passing ships and boats, but also the sighting of some astonishing bird life near the shore. Here the birds seem to ignore the presence of so many humans, and to be honest, most of the humans ignored the presence of the birds.

On the incoming edge of the tide were gulls galore, mainly herring gulls but with others including a handful of great black-backed gulls with some black-headed gulls among them, but they were joined by four cormorants who sat on the rocks, drying their outstretched wings.

As we enjoyed the sunshine and salt-laden sea breezes while resting on a bench, a robin was busy among rocks below us, singing heartily as he went about his business of seeking food. He remained among those rocks throughout our visit, quite oblivious of people nearby, and I thought he must have claimed that bed of huge rocks as his own territory. If so, woe betide any trespassing robins who might try to take the rocks from him.

I spotted what I thought were sanderlings running among the abandoned seaweed at the edge of the incoming tide. I counted only three which is a rather small gathering of sanderlings – they usually arrive in larger flocks to run along the edge of the tide, eternally seeking morsels of food.

They prefer sandy beaches, and in winter their plumage is a pale grey on the upper parts with white under-parts, but they have black legs and a black edge to their forewings. They are small wading birds, eight inches or so in length but seem to have no fear of humans.

However, they were accompanied by a small group of other birds that we identified as grey wagtails. These birds also walk along the edge of the tide, often identified by their long, twitching tails. Their backs and wings are grey with black edging but their under-parts are yellow which sometimes confuses them with their cousins, the less-familiar yellow wagtails. And like the sanderlings, these birds had no fear of humans; children, adults and dogs were playing nearby but these hardened hunters ignored them. And for the most part, the human continued to ignore the birds who at times were almost under their feet.

As witnesses to all these activities, we sat quietly in the briny sunshine, watching them all. But we had another mission. I wanted to find out whether the legendary Hob’s Cave in nearby cliffs had survived into modern times.

Modern maps show Hob Holes in those cliffs and I found several small caves with at least one large enough to accommodate several people. There is a tale that the original Hob’s Cave was destroyed by jet diggers, but belief in this creature seems to have dwindled before 1900. However, for centuries people believed that a hob – a sort of goblin – lived in a cave on the shore at Runswick Bay. He was believed to cure whooping cough in children and at low tide mothers would take their suffering youngsters to the cave entrance and chant:

Hob Hole Hob
My bairn’s gitten t’kink cough,
Tak it off, tak it off.

I have no record if how many cures were achieved by this hob but I am sure that a dose of sea-air and sunshine from Runswick Bay does wonders for all visitors.

Noisy nights with battledores

On the subject of hobs, more mythical creatures were believed to live at the eastern side of the bay at Runswick, in the cliffs that now support Kettleness. They were known as the Kettleness Bogles and further south near Robin Hood’s Bay is Boggle Hole, once the haunt of a similar creature. The double “g” is a local version of bogle so it appears that this belief extended further than the Kettleness bogles that were said to live in Claymore Well, not far from the edge of the cliffs.

Some years ago when questioned about the bogles, the people of Kettleness would claim that “Everybody knows about t’bogles” and explain that they could be heard washing and bleaching their clothes in Claymore Well. They would beat the clothes with an implement known as a battledore. This was a wooden object rather like the paddle of a canoe with a long handle and a circular blade. Women would use similar implements for smoothing their linen but they fell into disuse once the mangle was invented.

The bogles of Claymore Well at Kettleness would set aside one night a week for doing their washing, and the noise of their battledores in action could be heard at night. However, no accurate record exists because no-one dared to spy on the bogles as they carried out their work, thus no description of a bogle exists.

They were probably elf-like along with brownies, kelpies, gnomes, hobs, sprites, pixies, goblins and other imps like Robin Goodfellow, many of whom were thought to exist in this region. My own opinion is that the noises in the well came from the lapping of the water as it ebbed and flowed. It would produce eerie sounds at night but not so terrifying as the gytrash of Goathland, the barguest of Egton and the night-time howl of a fox or screech of a barn owl.