OS Explorer map OL27, North York Moors Eastern Area – I own this map, and had visited it before starting this blog. Visited again for this post 23rd September 2022.
Google Maps location links: Whitby, Scarborough, Staithes, Middlesbrough
I visited this map area as part of my All Line Rover trip in September 2022, travelling around Britain by train, for which I did day-by-day blog posts already, and am now going through doing my regular posts about the new map areas I visited. The main content below will therefore be just a lightly edited version of relevant parts from my post about Day 7 of the trip – for a more connected narrative I recommend taking a look there instead. However, the previous visits section will be new!
Coming on the X93 bus from Scarborough, I arrived in this map area at Whitby. Now I’ve visited Whitby in the past, but I feel I unfairly judged it. Everyone talks about how great it is, and Vesper loves it, having been on family holidays several times in the past.
However when I last visited, back in 2016, I visited the abbey and wandered around town, and was a little disappointed relative to my high expectations. As ruined abbeys go, Whitby’s one of the less complete and architecturally impressive ones – compared to, say, Rievaulx fairly nearby, or some of the Borders abbeys. I think I was also disappointed by the museum, which had barely anything on the Anglo-Saxon abbey, which I’d have been most interested in.
However, there’s still plenty to love about the abbey – it is indeed in a very dramatic position on the clifftops, and I really like the way it stands over the town so thousands of people get to see it. And of course, there’s much more to Whitby than the abbey – the town is great, with steep little lanes filled with curious shops and so on. I retract my previous opinion: Whitby is very nice!
After just a short wander around town – but still long enough for me to change my opinion on its niceness – I got on another train, for the bit of travelling I was most excited about for this trip: the Esk Valley Line from Whitby up to Middlesbrough. It seems a bit random that Whitby kept the line through the moors to Middlesbrough, while losing the much more useful-seeming route southwards to York via Malton, and the coastal route south to Scarborough. I’d expect people want to get from Whitby to York – from where one can go onwards to Leeds, London or any of the populated areas to the south and west – much more than they’d want to go north, which is good only for Teesside, Newcastle and Scotland. I’m sure there’s a reason, but I don’t know what it is!
In any case, the Esk Valley is always included in the lists of most scenic British railway lines, so I was looking forward to it. I’m glad to say it didn’t disappoint!
The journey was mostly through valleys with high moor on either side, which was just very pretty – I’m not sure it comes across that well in my photos, but I assure you it was good! Probably the second-prettiest rail line of the trip after the Settle and Carlisle, I think. The train also reverses at Battersby part-way through, with the driver needing to get out and change ends, which is fun. Soon enough, I arrived at Middlesbrough, leaving this map area.
Previous visits
As described above, I’ve been to Whitby before, on a trip to the Yorkshire Moors in August 2016. During that trip, I mainly stayed in the eastern half of the moors, which is a separate map area. However, I did indeed venture westwards one day, starting out by visiting the seaside village of Staithes.
Staithes was really pretty! The village is on a steep slope, which I had to walk down to get to the sea, having parked at the top of the hill. It has a cute harbour among the cliffs, lots of characterful narrow streets and so on.
From there I went on to Whitby, which high expectations for the Abbey that turned into a mild disappointment as described above. Oh well, I’m glad I appreciated the town more the second time I went!
Visiting all the maps! 
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