Kettleness is on the top of the huge cliffs, and to
reach the shore one must climb down a zigzag path. It is a broad and
solid pathway until half-way down, where it assumes the character of a
goat-track, being a mere treading down of the loose shale of which the
enormous cliff is formed. The sliding down of the crumbling rock
constantly carries away the path, but a little spade-work soon makes
the track firm again. This portion of the cliff has something of a
history, for one night in 1829 the inhabitants of many of the cottages
originally forming the village of Kettleness were warned of impending
danger by subterranean noises. Fearing a subsidence of the cliff, they
betook themselves to a small schooner lying in the bay. This wise move
had not long been accomplished, when a huge section of the ground
occupied by the cottages slid down the great cliff and the next morning
there was little to be seen but a sloping mound of lias shale at the
foot of the precipice. The villagers recovered some of their property
by digging, and some pieces of broken crockery from one of the cottages
are still to be seen on the shore near the ferryman's hut, where the
path joins the shore.

This sandy beach, lapped by the blue waves of Runswick Bay, is one of
the finest and most spectacular spots to be found on the rocky
coast-line of Yorkshire. You look northwards across the sunlit sea to
the rocky heights hiding Port Mulgrave and Staithes, and on the further
side of the bay you see tiny Runswick's red roofs, one above the other,
on the face of the cliff. Here it is always cool and pleasant in the
hottest weather, and from the broad shadows cast by the precipices
above one can revel in the sunny land- and sea-scapes without that fishy
odour so unavoidable in the villages. When the sun is beginning to
climb down the sky in the direction of Hinderwell, and everything is
bathed in a glorious golden light, the ferryman will row you across the
bay to Runswick, but a scramble over the rocks on the beach will be
repaid by a closer view of the now half-filled-up Hob Hole. The
fisherfolk believed this cave to be the home of a kindly-disposed fairy
or hob, who seems to have been one of the slow-dying inhabitants of the
world of mythology implicitly believed in by the Saxons. And these
beliefs died so hard in these lonely Yorkshire villages that until
recent times a mother would carry her child suffering from
whooping-cough along the beach to the mou