Filey

We came to Filey almost by accident, because Scarborough was heaving with a bank holiday crowd and Lia found this town twenty minutes south on the map, promising “the same coast, fewer people.” That turned out to be exactly right. Filey has a genuinely enormous bay — a long curve of sand held between two headlands, with the tide going out so far at low water that people were walking what looked like specks in the distance, still on sand, still nowhere near the sea.

The town itself sits up on the clifftop, a modest grid of Victorian guesthouses and a proper old-fashioned high street, with steep paths called Ravine and Church Ravine cutting down through gorse and gardens to reach the beach. We took Church Ravine down and it dumps you out right onto the sand near the Brigg, this long natural reef of rock that extends out from the southern end of the bay. At low tide you can walk right out onto it, picking over rock pools full of tiny crabs, though a local fisherman warned us not to get caught out there when the tide turns because it comes in fast over the flat rock.

What struck me most was just how unhurried the whole place felt. No arcades blaring music, no queue for chips — well, there was a queue for chips, there’s always a queue for chips in Yorkshire, but it moved fast and the woman behind the counter recognized half the people in line. We ate ours sitting on the sea wall watching a handful of kids fly kites in a wind that never seemed to let up, and a man walking the same stretch of beach with his dog three separate times while we sat there.

Filey doesn’t try to sell itself the way its neighbors do — there’s no big theme park, no dramatic castle ruin on a headline. What it has is the bay itself, and a coastal path along the Brigg that connects into the Cleveland Way, which serious walkers use as a jumping-off point toward Flamborough Head. We only did a short stretch of it before turning back for the chips, but even that hour of clifftop walking, wind coming straight off the North Sea, felt like it cleared something out of my head that Scarborough’s crowds had put there.

When to go: Check the tide tables before you go and aim for low tide to walk the Brigg properly; early autumn gives you quieter beaches and still-decent weather.