Steep fishing village between towering headlands.
Staithes is squeezed into a narrow cleft between high cliffs, its painted cottages packed tight along the harbour — one of the most striking villages on this coast. A young James Cook was apprenticed to a shopkeeper here in the 1740s before he moved to Whitby and went to sea. It later drew a colony of painters. Park at the top; the lanes down are far too steep and narrow to drive.
