For Cliff fans (got myself a crying, walking, sleeping, talking etc .............)

Distance: Three miles.

General Location: East Yorkshire coast.

Start: RSPB Visitor Centre.

Right of Way: Public and permissive.

Map: Drawn from OS Explorer 301 Scarborough, Bridlington & Flamborough Head.

Dogs: Legal, close control, dangerous cliffs.

Date walked: June 2006.

Road Route: The B1229 road from Flamborough to Filey road. In Bempton north at the White Horse pub for cliff road, brown signs, 1mile.

Car Parking: RSPB Visitor Centre, £3.50 per car (2006).

Lavatories: Visitors Centre.

Refreshments: Visitors Centre.

Tourist & Public Transport Information: RSPB Bempton 01262 851179.

Terrain: Cliff top and hinterland.

Points of interest: Seabird City by Richard Vaughan, published 1998 by Smith Settle.

Difficulty: Easy, good disabled access.

Please observe the Country Code and park sensibly. While every effort is made to provide accurate information, walkers set out at their own risk.

Please click the image below to go to the walking route sketch map and detailed directions, or scroll down to a Google Map of the route, the route description, and an image gallery. Plus you can bookmark this page on your favourite social bookmarking site, and comment on the walk. We hope you enjoy the walk. 

Googlemap

Please click on "Map" to see a cartographic map view of the route and "Hybrid" to see the combined map and Satellite. Please use the zoom tools or drag the slider to move in close or to zoom out (or use mousewheel zoom). Use the pan tools to move the map vertically and horizontally or place your mouse over the map and it changes to a hand; click your mouse to "grab" the map to manually scroll the map in any direction. The two hikers icon shows the start of the route and clicking on it will show the route starting direction.

Please note that the outline route is a guide only and on full or near full zoom cannot be guaranteed to follow every twist and turn of the route described.

If you can’t immediately see the walk route on the Google Map, please refresh the screen.

Midsummer enticed us to Sea Bird City, the cliffs at Bempton, at dawn, or nearly. The RSPB car park was deserted but quite a lot of little birds were already on the go, up and about in the scrub, the pheasants didn’t look dozy, odd to see them here, the pigeons tend to be rock doves.

There was no sunrise, but from the Grandstand viewpoint the city was hectic, the vertical suburbs on the high lime white cliffs, pale areas of kittiwakes, black rows of guillemots and a patch low down by the water, where the chalk flares out, that had an assemblage of 50 or so gannets which are 20^th century incomers.

There was fighting, necking, nibbling, theft, grabbing, and pecking, and general anti-social behaviour by those that didn’t know their place or nook or cranny. Commuters were whizzing and skimming out to fishing grounds, a thousand flight paths through air tangy with salt and the sweet and sour scent of guano, winging out over a calm clear sea dotted with birds as far as the binoculars would allow to a quietening horizon and a few calm ships.

A guillemot had a fish tail forking from its beak. Four razorbills occupied a ledge close to the viewpoint, when one shuffled there was a glimpse of a big fluffy chick. Mid June is egg to chick time. By August particular species and many birds will have cleared off. By winter the city will be near deserted.

Headlands jut out to sea to the north as in Filey way, and south around Bridlington. Inland are very colourful meadows with orchids that grow to the edge so one walks through flowers along the cliff.

The route passes a deep cleft in the rock, relatively uninhabited, and then there's a grand view to a massive face of chalk supported at the end by a sea arch and home to many thousands more of the quarter of a million locals.

Next stop, my favourite, is called Staple Newk; here is a bench for breakfast sandwiches and the best gannet colony. The handsome birds have a large rock to themselves, packed wing to wing, though there are a few puffins and guillemots tucked in spaces too small for the big boys. Gannet nests are smeared on and laced together with orange and blue nylon strands of rope and bits of net. The colony emits creaking calls, they fly out in squadrons, if you’re lucky you will see some of their spectacular diving, beak spear fishing.

Something kept spooking the kittiwakes, the pretty things swirled out in their thousands.

At the end of our coastal length there's, thanks to Countryside Stewardship Site, the chance to make a nice circuit back through the hinterland via fields that have been taken out of arable cultivation for the birds and other wildlife. Probably a result of this and a bonus for early rising was a gang of seven boxing hares.

A bit of back lane is certainly quiet, growing yellow, firstly with splattered lichen and then fuzzy with bird’s-foot trefoil. The line of trees to the south marks one end of Danes’ Dyke which cuts right across the Flamborough headland and is much speculated on.

There is a trigpoint, it stood half obscured by wheat, at 341 feet above sea level, that’s virtually the height of the cliffs, so the walk is an easy one, and the highland cattle were in another field.

We came back to the Visitor Centre, birdwatchers were moving out with their telescopes and such, you can hire binoculars here. We needed a wake up coffee, they hadn’t opened yet, so it was a Filey café finish to a fabulous morning.

Image Gallery

Please click on the word "Pictures" to toggle the thumbnails on and off. Hover your mouse over the image to see the forward and back arrows to view the gallery. 

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Comments

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David - Bempton Cliffs 10 February 200     | 217.155.204.xxx | 2008-02-10 16:52:43 We did this walk in glorious sunshine (10C) today and nothing to report. We extended the walk from (3) along the cliffs to the end of Danes' Dyke and back. It is a wonderful edifice (http://www.eastriding.gov.uk/environment/pdf/danes_dyke.pdf). There's a human-height carved wooden puffin there too, with great views over the far coves south to Flamborough lighthouses. Note for birdlovers: the bulk-buy birdseed in the RSPB visitor centre is good value. David Reply 0   0

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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.

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