North Yorkshire

The England Coast Path crosses over the border from East Yorkshire to North Yorkshire on Speeton Cliffs to the north of Flamborough Head and the south of Filey. At the time of writing (late 2023) we haven't walked the first five miles or so, up to Filey, but we have walked along the coast for the rest of the county, including the section that I would have said was in the county of Cleveland, were it not that Cleveland ceased to exist in 1996! North Yorkshire now extends all the way up to the River Tees, including the towns of Redcar (which is on the coast) and Middlesbrough (on the south bank of the River Tees, 7 miles from the North Sea). Because it needs to cross the river into Durham, the England Coast Path actually tracks the Tees Estuary to Middlesbrough where you can cross the river by way of the Newport Bridge (or, better, were it not for the fact that it has been closed both times we have been there, by the Transporter Bridge). 

A lot of the walking along the North Yorkshire coast is along picturesque cliffs, where the North York Moors meet the sea.  Every so often you encounter a steep descent to a pretty beach and the cliffs are interspersed by attractive villages like Robin Hood's Bay, Runswick Bay and Staithes and the towns of Scarborough and Whitby. It's a delightful section of coast, which we walked from north to south (i.e. in a clockwise direction) as part of our walk along the  Cleveland Way in June 2008. This took us from one seaside resort (Saltburn-by-the-Sea) to another (Filey) in individual legs from Saltburn-by-the-Sea to Runswick Bay, from Runswick Bay to Robin Hood's Bay, from Robin Hood's Bay to Scarborough, and from Scarborough to Filey.

Much of the North Yorkshire coast was once industrial, but to the south of Saltburn that's all gone now. However, if you look north from Saltburn, your eye is inevitably drawn to the Redcar Steelworks, which were closed when we were here in 2008. When we returned in July 2015 and walked (now heading round the coast in an anticlockwise direction) from Saltburn to Redcar and the mouth of the Tees, the Steelworks had been reopened (though sadly it didn't last; they closed again in October 2015). In this section, and as we continued from Redcar the following day, past the Transporter Bridge (closed) and the Newport Bridge (where we actually crossed the River Tees), we were definitely walking through a landscape that has been the home of heavy industry in the relatively recent past. However, there were some quite pretty sections, especially around Redcar itself, and elsewhere, both on the approach to South Gare lighthouse at the mouth of the Tees and as we walked parallel with the river estuary, which had an attractive wild feel to them.