Staithes: The seaside village with one of the most-photographed vistas anywhere on Yorkshire’s coast

And at the top of Cowbar Bank, visitors are taking in one of the best-known and most-photographed vistas anywhere on Yorkshire’s coast – the view down the beck to the harbour sheltered by the great cliff of Cowbar Nab on its northern side.

Families with children might find that view very familiar even if they have never been here before – Staithes was used as the location for the much-loved BBC television series Old Jack’s Boat, starring the late Bernard Cribbins, and one of the cottages on the bank served as his character’s home.

Staithes, midway between Whitby and Saltburn, truly comes fully alive in summer when the visitors arrive, but in a few short weeks it will feel very different, its streets and harbour almost deserted because so many of its cottages are second homes or lets.

They outnumber permanently-occupied homes in the lower part of the village, to the disquiet of residents and civic leaders who worry about the hollowing-out effect so much holiday accommodation can have on a community, yet Staithes retains the character of the fishing village it historically was.

And that’s why the visitors come and snap up properties, for the atmosphere of authenticity.

Its buildings are crammed together behind the harbour, accessible only by a single steep and narrow road, off which steps and alleyways run between the cottages. Staithes still feels like a place standing apart, minding its own business and untroubled by being shut off from the outside world, as it was before tourism came.

This was once one of the busiest ports in Yorkshire, with 80 boats at the turn of the 20th century. They were crewed by nearly 400 men, with many more working ashore as fish-curers, boat-builders, sail-makers and coopers.

The fishermen’s wives also had a vital role. Wearing traditional Staithes bonnets, made from a full yard of cloth and reinforced at the crown for carrying boxes on their heads, they packed the catch for dispatch inland, part of a once-mighty east coast fishing industry which fed the workers of Yorkshire’s industrial revolution.

There are only a handful of boats now, moored in the shelter of the sea wall and breakwaters, or in Staithes Beck.

The village has many stories to tell about its relationship to the sea, which can be ferocious.

The building where the young James Cook began as a shopkeeper’s apprentice, long before he grew into one of history’s great explorers, setting out from Whitby to discover new lands, was washed away by storms in the 18th century, though a cottage on Church Street bears a commemorative plaque to his time in Staithes.

And in 1953 the front of the Cod and Lobster inn, on the harbour, was demolished by waves which littered the sands along the coast with bottles of beer for beachcombers to salvage. In rough weather, the pub’s customers still have to skip smartly inside to avoid getting their feet wet.

The pull of the sea was to draw a very different community to Staithes, whose lives could hardly have been less like those of the fishing families, and who left the village with a legacy unique on Yorkshire’s coast.

For three decades beginning in about 1880, Staithes became home to a colony of artists who recorded its life – and its grief for those lost at sea. What became known as the Staithes Group of about 30 impressionists were drawn by its light, landscape and an urge to work in the open.

They painted the cobles setting sail and returning with the catch, the interiors of sparsely-furnished cottages and the storms. The fishing families earned a meagre supplement to their livelihoods from the pennies the artists paid them to model.

The artists’ work was first exhibited at the village’s Fishermen’s Institute, but outgrew it and moved to Whitby. Wealthy patrons sustained the group, but by 1907 it was starting to drift apart in search of new locations.

The leading figures in the colony, making regular visits for 10 years from 1897, were Harold Knight and his wife-to-be, Laura Jackson.

Laura Knight (1877 – 1970) was to become one of Britain’s most acclaimed and popular artists, being created a dame in 1929 and seven years later becoming the first woman elected to full membership of the Royal Academy.

In her 1936 memoir, Oil Paint and Grease Paint, Dame Laura wrote: “Staithes … it was there that I found myself and what I might do. The life and place were what I yearned for – the freedom, the austerity, the savagery, the wilderness. I loved the cold and the northerly storms when no covering would protect you. I loved the strange race of people who lived there, whose stern almost forbidding exterior formed such contrasts to the warmth and richness of their nature.”

Staithes celebrates its artistic legacy in a festival every September when about 100 cottages become pop-up galleries. This year’s festival is on the weekend of September 14 and 15.

Those who visit, and all enjoying summer’s best weeks in this most atmospheric of coastal villages, will find that the heritage of fishing the artists recorded still feels very close at hand.