Maps

Jiddy Vardy is set in the small, coastal village of Robin Hood’s Bay. It is a maze of alleyways, snickets, ginnels, cut-throughs, steps and courtyards. Cottages pile higgledy-piggledy up from the harbour, scrambling over the steep slope to the top. Misshapen, surprising and charming. 

When I first visited Baytown, as the old, original part of the settlement is often called, I met people who lived there and who didn’t only descend on their holiday cottage at weekends. Now, the cottages are filled with holiday guests, with less living by the sea, full-time.

But it wasn’t always so attractive to visitors. In the 1700’s it had a land collapse, which took part of the hill and houses with it into the sea. Fishing was the trade. And smuggling.

It was a rough and wild place to live. Smuggling was rife and it wasn’t only the alleyways, snickets and cut-throughs that were used to get about. Contraband traveled from the beach to the top of the Bay using other methods as well. Women may have carried perfumes and brandy in pigskin bags tied on a belt under their skirts, overnight seeming to widen their hips but bigger items needed other means. Bags, sacks and barrels were passed through hidden passageways and holes in the cottage walls, hand to hand and well out of sight of the Preventive soldiers. Higgledy-piggledy, closely built houses had a very good use in the smuggling business!

Maybe that is one of the reasons, Robin Hood’s Bay was such a successful smuggling community. And it also could have had a little to do with the brave, resourceful Jiddy Vardy.

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