Is that a heart floating above The Ship Inn at Old Saltburn. Charming. The pilot must have been struck by a fit of sentiment, or perhaps simply bored stiff.
Back in the eighteenth century this tiny fishing village beneath Huntcliff and the ever-so-subtle Cat Nab managed to support four inns, plus enough gin shops to pickle an army. Today only the Ship survives. All of them ministered to the row of cottages that once huddled below Cat Nab before the road came along and swept them away in the name of progress.
The settlement can be traced to the late sixteenth century, though it blossomed, if that is the word, into a cosy refuge for smugglers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth. The Ship Inn has dined out on that history ever since. Smuggling was less a crime and more a community project, with the local elite and the law joining in with the air of people doing their civic duty. Saltburn even acquired its own line of coastguard cottages on Huntcliff, a sort of official wagging finger at the villagers’ enthusiasm1Saltburn-by-the-Sea, History. http://www.saltburnbysea.com/html/old-saltburn.html [Accessed 4 December 2025].
When this golden age of the contraband business fizzled out, Old Saltburn plodded on as a seafaring settlement. Most residents scraped a living as sailors or fishermen, and some took to gathering ironstone nodules from the beach for shipment to Newcastle, a pastime that only gained steady pay when the first ironstone mines opened in the 1860s. The village’s gift for the nautical was confirmed in the 1880s with the construction of a small mortuary to store the bodies of sailors periodically deposited by the sea, as though the water simply could not resist sharing.
- 1Saltburn-by-the-Sea, History. http://www.saltburnbysea.com/html/old-saltburn.html [Accessed 4 December 2025]
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