Shipwrecked Laura
Getting to the most secluded beaches often requires a little more navigation than normal. And access to the beautiful wide stretch of sand at Speeton is no exception.
So on our 18th wedding anniversary, instead of wining and dining in the finest restaurant in town, my husband and I found ourselves scrambling down a rugged cliff to reach the beach below. The clamber down is well worth it for a stunning coastal walk along a beautiful beach and the cliff tops above.
This 6-mile walk starts at the delightful little Norman chapel of St Leonard’s. It is always open and worth a wander around either before or after your walk.
From the chapel you take the public footpath across a couple of fields to meet the coastal path. From here you need to descend the cliff along a steep, winding path onto the beach (as described above).
If the tide is out Speeton Sands is a huge expanse of sandy beach with Filey towards its northern end and the massive rock face of Bempton Cliffs, home to hundreds of seabirds, to the south. It’s almost a guarantee that you will have this section of the beach to yourself.
The only thing interrupting the vista across the white sands are the remains of WW2 fortifications and a couple of shipwrecks. The remaining hunks of the wreck, encrusted with barnacles, algae and seaweed, have become landmarks rooted in the seascape here.
The story and old photographs of this wreck, ‘Laura’, is told back at the chapel of St Leonard’s. The Austrian-owned ship was carrying coke from Newcastle to Trieste when she ran aground in thick fog in 1897. The Filey Coastguard attended the scene. Thankfully the 24-man crew survived but ‘Laura’ was broken by the tide and was left to the elements. Only her two boilers and stern posts are visible at low tide some one hundred or so years later.
After stopping to take photographs of the remaining parts of the wreck, we continued our walk along the beach. We passed a break in the cliffs which leads up to Reighton Sands Holiday Park and access back onto the cliff top, and walked onto Hunmanby Gap for a picnic. There is a lovely little café on the way up from the beach which is open year round, serving drinks, sandwiches and cakes.
Our return was via a cliff top walk, passing through the Holiday Park at Reighton and along permissive paths following field edges back to Speeton. As these paths are not marked on the OS map, this section does require a bit of navigation to get back to the start of the walk at Speeton but it’s not too tricky to figure out. Check out this website for more detailed information on this walk.
