The hotel sits 600ft above the sea on a clifftop so exposed to the elements that they defeated even Victorian railway entrepreneurs who tried to build a resort – a new Scarborough or Saltburn – to take advantage of probably the finest views in North Yorkshire. Raven Hall Hotel with the Panorama restaurant on the right Before our meal, we’d walked around the castellated cliff edge, marvelling at the steep drop down to the grey seals howling on the shoreline, and at the way the grey sea rolls in orderly rows of white-topped breakers into Robin Hood’s Bay. On the far side of the bay, the orange-topped houses of the distant village tumbled down the cliff into the sea.
Our views, though, were disrupted when the wind picked up a squall and flung sharp-tipped droplets of rain that made our faces smart and so, holding onto our hoods, we retreated to the sanctuary of the Panorama restaurant. Looking over the castellated wall of the Raven Hall Hotel towards Robin Hood's Bay. Picture: Diane Staveley It was this exposure to the elements, and the massive 600ft plunge to the stony beach, that defeated the Victorian entrepreneurs (Scarborough is only 230ft above sea level and Saltburn is just above 100ft, so the Ravenscar descent to the beach was unprecedented).
In 1885, the railwaymen built what is said to have been the most expensive line in the country along the clifftop from Whitby to Scarborough – it cost £27,000-a-mile, which is £2.95m in today’s values, which is a vast .
