TRAVEL NORTH - 9: TEES TO ESK - Take the Coast Road from Teesside to Whitby (diverting inland to Cook Country)

The Angles spread north from the Humber, along the coast and inland to the Roman city of Eboracum, which they named Eoferwic. We will follow from the northern boundary of Deira, the southern half of Northanhymbra, or Northumbria as we know the land.

The Tees empties north-east of Middlesbrough, once a halfway stop for monks going between Durham and Whitby Abbey in the 7th Century. Oh, and there was also a farm and an inn, and the settlement was known until the late middle ages as Middilburh, then Middelburg - like the town in the Netherlands - and finally from the mid-19th Century as Middlesbrough, initially the Middlesbrough Estate. The Pease family of Stockton & Darlington Railway fame founded Port Darlington, later renamed Newport, which in turn expanded as the Ironmasters' District. The core of the old town centred on a site north of the present (1877) railway station to the west of the Commercial hub of the new town. Finds of ironstone in the hills behind, south-eastward at Eston, by the Welsh ironmaster John Vaughan changed the place forever and Middlesbrough became the fastest-growing town in Europe in the 19th-20th Centuries. He and the German-born Henry Bolckow founded Bolckow Vaughan's steelworks between the new towns of South Bank and Grangetown. Bolckow went on to become the town's first mayor and built himself a fine residence in what is now known as Stewart Park at Marton. The house burnt down, but what was found was the remains of the cottage in which James Cook was born on 27th October, 1728, now near the site of the James Cook Birthplace Museum... opposite James Cook Hospital. Sounds familiar? We'll travel on a little way southward to Great Ayton - Canny Yatton in the local vernacular, there's several different kinds of 'canny', in this instance it means 'great' - where his father, James cook senior was employed by Squire Scottowe and was loaned a farm whilst he was Scottowe's bailiff, called Aireyholme Farm on the east of the village beneath Roseberry Topping and Easby Moor where a monument was erected in young Cook's memory. Any wiser yet?

No, well we'll go a bit further. James junior's education at the local school - now a museum at the back of the green where a bronze statue of him as a young lad was erected - was paid for by Squire Scottowe because of the promise he showed in maths. James left school in 1745, apprenticed to a William Sanderson, a shopkeeper in Staithes - Steeaz in the vernacular - and tramped from Ayton to the coast along an old footpath known to us as the Cleveland Way. Cleveland is a corruption of the old Danish Kliff Land, cliff land, due to the way the Cleveland Hills to the south rise up from the dale floor. He would have gone behind Guisborough, onceover land belonging to the de Brus family after the Conquest, one of whose descendants became king of Scotland, Robert the Bruce, Lord of Annandale. The present Lord Annandale still owns lands in the area between Guisborough and Skelton, but Skelton Castle is a ruin, as is Gisborough (Guisborough) Priory to the east of this picturesque market town, once capital of East Cleveland.

Next after Guisborough over the moor is Kildale, where the Monk's Trod joins the two communities. Kildale is a sleepy village with a church and a tearoom near the railway, and would have been even sleepier then. The church's greatest claim to fame is a hog's=back tombstone within, but you'd need to contact the vicar to see it. Further over the moor the trail leads to the coast above Saltburn, and old fisherman's hamlet in the lee of Huntcliff, and beneath the Victorian resort built by the Pease family as a dormitory town for urban workers. Old Saltburn, in Cook's time, was a haven for smugglers. A museum next to the Ship Inn shows how the smugglers operated from the old inn... and the smugglers' leader was a local JP (Justice of the Peace) who was eventually caught and taken to York Castle Jail for trial.

James would have climbed to the top of Huntcliff along the old path from behind where the present-day Ship Inn cap park slopes away from the back of the building, and headed south along the clifftop track below Carlin Howe, and past Skinngrove - the Shining Grove, an ash grove and place of worship for the Danes who lived here and venerated the old gods. Up onto Boulby Moor the track led, overlooking the sea - a large house used as a residence by the manager of the local ironstone mine along the old road was found to have a passage that led to the sea, used by more smugglers! From here James could see his destination and tramped steeply downhill, but you can follow the A173 in a car or bus if you want.

At Staithes, the fishing village road leaves the A173 past the newer community where the "off-comers" live - you would have to be born in the bottom village to be seen as Steeaz-born - and down the steep bank past old stone dwellings and chapels to the harbour where a huddle of old inns, cafe's, shops, artists' homes and fishermen's cottages fills the level ground to the east of Staithes Beck. Opposite is the equally steeply graded Cowbar road that leads down to the west side of the cliff. Here, at the bottom was where William Sanderson's shop sat precariously on a ledge beneath Cowbar Nab. I say was, as not many years after Cook was killed by a Hawaiian tribal club in February 1779 a freak storm split the end of the rock and what had been there was washed away in the maelstrom that accompanied hurricane winds and mountainous seas. William Sanderson's shop was no more (I don't know what happened to the man himself, but if he was sound asleep in bed as he should have been in the dead of night when the storm struck, then he would have gone with the shop and his eastern neighbours)!

Anyway, James had not been long in Staithes, listening to the old mariners and fishermen in the small harbour, when he got the bug. He wanted to go to sea. How to do that? Work for the owner of a local fleet of collier ships, Whitby Cats as they called them, wide-beamed, two-masted vessels of shallow draught that followed the coast from Newcastle-upon-Tyne's coal staiths to the new fledgling industries on the River Thames upriver of the Port of London. Some of the Cats conveyed alum shale for the dyers from coastal workings to north and south of Whitby and raw materials by return.

At Whitby, known to the Angles as Streoneshealh, an abbey had been founded by a sister of King Oswiu/Oswy in the 7th Century. Saint Hilda's abbey was destroyed in the 9th Century by the Norsemen, and again in the 16th Century by order of Henry VIII - a Christian king. Streoneshealh became Hvitby (the white town, possibly by virtue of its light-coloured stone abbey), and finally Whitby. Shipbuilding, fishing, alum-shale processing and commerce from the sea determined the character of this town nestled between the steep sides of the Esk dale, and by the time James Cook arrived in the employ of the Quaker ship-owner John Walker in 1746 Whitby was a bustling centre amid a cluster of satellite villages and hamlets such as Sandsend, Ruswarp, Sleights, Hawsker and Ugglebarnby, connected by steep roads such as to Lythe and Hinderwell up Lythe Bank and up to Bog Hall or West Cliff. In the 19th Century Whitby joined Scarborough - another Norse settlement, originally Skarthiburh - in its fame as a seaside resort.

James showed promise, by the age of 21 achieving his Mate's Ticket and another year or two later his Master's Ticket. Suddenly the east coast was too small. The Royal Navy soon beckoned, a lieutenancy and across the Atlantic a war with the French in Canada. Know yet who this is? One last try then. He had become known for the accuracy of his navigating - remember Squire Scottowe saw promise and paid for his education? On the upper reaches of the Saint Laurence River is Montreal. French guns threatened to blow the English ships out of the water if the Navy got too close. After all, it's easier firing a gun downward than upward. So Cook was asked to furnish charts and soundings around Quebec's riverways so that General Wolfe - himself having once lived in Yorkshire, at the Black Swan on Stonebow in York,known locally as the 'Mucky Duck' - could lead an assault on General Montcalm's heavily fortified of Quebec City from the Heights of Abraham. Over the years James Cook's commission took him to Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia Antarctica, the west coast of Canada to find the fabled north-west passage, and finally Hawaii. Got it yet? Of course James Cook was Captain Cook on his last voyage, in charge of two ships,Resolution and Discovery. One of his lieutenants was William Bligh, who ordered the ships to fire on the assembled Hawaiians after Cook was bludgeoned to death on the beach due to a sad misunderstanding.

Back to Yorkshire. When his father had retired, 'young' James Cook often visited him at his first home near the River Leven bridge. Cook Senior later moved to the then peaceful Marske-by-the-Sea and was buried in the churchyard of Saint Germaine's overlooking the North Sea. Like Saltburn, Marske has a new town on the plateau with an older fishing village in a vee-shaped valley below that opens out onto the soft sandy beach between low clay-stone sea cliffs. To the north is the relatively level Redcar and south is the hilly Saltburn. (The Sea-front of Redcar doubled as Dunkirk for the film 'Atonement' with a little judicial 'tweaking' of the scenery).

Not far along the coast south of Saltburn and Staithes is Runswick, another fishing village-turned-seaside resort in a quiet fashion. The visitors come in the summer months only, and like Staithes there is a newer settlement on the plain above an older fishing village that nestles against a steep hillside. A promontory divides Runswick from Staithes, in the shadow of which is a small white-painted cottage which was used by Alf Wight (James Herriot) for part of his honeymoon in the 1940's.

South again Hinderwell lies inland a little way from Kettleness on the coast, a small cove not big enough to warrant seaside development, and then Lythe with its solid church and collection of cottages and public houses on the Whitby-Loftus road, the A173. At the foot of a tortuously bendy road on a gradient of 1-in-4 is Sandsend, where a row of old cottages leads away from the main road by the side of a beck. One of the cottages has a blue plaque on the wall. This is where James Cook lived at some time during his employ with John Walker.

At Whitby, below the abbey in Saltwick Bay is where Count Dracula is supposed to have come ashore in the guise of a wolf - according to the Irish writer Bram Stoker. A Dracula festival is still held annually at Whitby, where folk of an artistic disposition dress up. This is where the 'Goths' hang out in the autumn. But if your tastes don't run to blood, there's a massive choice of public houses and inns in the harbour area on either side of the river. Look around the town before you take to the choice of brewer products, though. There is the beach that stretches from the north side of Whitby's famous twin-piered harbour. Anglers use the lower 'deck' of the east pier, but not in winter (unless they're roped to the rails)! Heavy swells - not well-dressed fat men - can carry off a fully-grown man at this time of the year. There's a well-patronised selection of cafes near the turntable bridge for teetotallers, including one fish and chip restaurant that attracts customers from far and wide and you's have to queue for hours to get a table! The abbey is owned by English Heritage, along with the Cholmley manor house nearby. The Cholmley's were well-connected to the royal family and supplied processed alum shale to the dyeing trade. They owned most of the alum quarries on the coast around Whitby, the alum shale bing used as a chemical to make the dyes fast on clothing. Previously alum shale had been imported from Italy, but with the idiosyncrasies of war and polical machinations worthy of Macchiavelli the supply was unreliable, hence the search was begun in the sixteenth century for a local source.

So there you have it. A coastal wandering, moving inland a little along some of the best coastal scenery in England - if not Britain - and a chunk of history thrown in! With luck I'll have whetted your appetite for a trip worth remembering. Visit a) the Tees Valley website, www.visitteesvalley.co.uk/ and b) North Yorkshire Tourist Board on their web site www.discovernorthyorkshire.co.uk for an accommodation guide, maps and general directions, Enjoy your holiday!

Travel links:

www.northyorks.gov.uk/ ; www.yorkshiretravel.net/ ; www.visitteesvalley.co.uk/

www.arriva.co.uk/traveline.info/ ; www.weatheronline.co.uk

Next - 7: West to East over the Moors