Runswick Bay is a tiny village of red-roofed cottages piled up the cliff at the north end of a curving sandy bay, a few miles north of Whitby. Most of the old village slid into the sea in 1682, and the houses you see were rebuilt on the same unstable slope.
The beach is one of the best on this stretch of the North York Moors coast, good for rock-pooling and fossils at low tide. The Cleveland Way runs along the cliff top to Staithes and Sandsend.