Filey Bay: The stunning four-mile long stretch of beach which is the longest in Yorkshire

The Romans built a pier on the south side of the Brigg in the late 3rd century, part of which is still exposed at low tide.

The beach itself was a perfect landing place for flat-bottomed Viking longships when they began arriving in 793 AD.

Their design of “clinker” overlapping planks and flat bottoms later inspired the coble fishing boats that are now beach-launched in Filey Bay.

In 1910 the Leeds aviation pioneer Robert Blackburn drew large crowds when he used the beach as a runway while testing a new monoplane.

He would go on to build the Blackburn Aeroplane & Motor Company factory at Brough near Hull.

There have been numerous shipwrecks offshore. Between 1914 and 1918 alone there were 17 recorded sinkings. One fishing coble, the Edith Cavell, was torpedoed by a German U-boat and her crew taken aboard. They were later released on the Farne Islands, Northumberland.

In WWII a military training base, RAF Hunmanby Moor, was established above the bay towards its south end, and after the war it became Butlin’s Filey Holiday Camp with its own train halt on the Bridlington-Scarborough line as well as a boating lake and narrow-gauge railway.

In the 1950s the camp could accommodate 11,000 at a time, and in 1975 there were almost 200,000 guests.

Due to the rise of cheap foreign holidays the camp closed in 1983 and today part of the site is occupied by the Primrose Valley holiday park.

The bay is still busy in summer, mostly with day trippers, and popular with surfers.