Everything is very clean and orderly, and, although most of the houses are very old, they are generally in a good state of repair, exhibiting in every case the seaman’s love of fresh paint.  Thus, the dark and worn stone walls have bright eyes in their newly-painted doors and windows.  Over their doorsteps the fishermen’s wives are quite fastidious, and you seldom see a mark on the ochre-coloured hearthstone with which the women love to brighten the worn stones.  Even the scrapers are sleek with blacklead, and it is not easy to find a window without spotlessly clean curtains.  The little coastguard station by the opening on to the shore has difficulty in showing itself superior to the rest in these essential matters of smartness.  However, the coastguards glory in a little stone pathway protected by a low wall in front of their building.  On this narrow quarter-deck the men love to walk to and fro, just as though they were afloat and were limited to this space for exercise.  At high-tide the sea comes halfway up the steep opening between the coastguards’ quarters and the inn which is built on another bastion, and in rough weather the waves break hungrily on to the strong stone walls, for the bay is entirely open to the full force of gales from the east or north-east.  All the way from Scarborough to Whitby the coast offers no shelter of any sort in heavy weather, and many vessels have been lost on the rocks.  On one occasion a small sailing-ship was driven right into this bay at high-tide, and the bowsprit smashed into a window of the little hotel that occupied the place of the present one.

With angry seas periodically demolishing the outermost houses, it seems almost unaccountable that the little town should have persisted in clinging so tenaciously to the high-water mark; but there were probably two paramount reasons for this.  The deep gully was to a great extent protected from the force of the winds, and, as it was soon quite brimful of houses, every inch of space was valuable; then, smuggling was freely practised along the coast, and the more the houses were wedged together, the more opportunities for secret hiding-places would be afforded.  The whole town has a consciously guilty look in its evident desire to conceal itself; and the steep narrow streets, the curious passages where it is scarcely possible for two people to pass, and the little courts which look like culs-de-sac but have a hidden flight of steps leading down to another passage, seem to be purposely intricate and confusing.  For I can imagine a revenue cutter chasing a boat into Robin Hood’s Bay, and I can see the smugglers hastily landing on the beach and making for the town, followed by the Excise officers, who are as unable to trace the men as though they had been chasing rabbits in a warren.  The stream that made this retreat for the fishing-town is now scarcely more than a drain when it reaches the houses, for, after passing along the foot of a great perpendicular mass of shale, it rushes into a tunnel, and only appears again on the shore.