Tall tales and true: of Yorkshire moors and the byways of Surrey: Flither pickers and other fisher folk

We have over the years visited many of the lovely villages that have attracted artists over the ages: Ponte Aven in France, Santorini in Greece, Clovelly in England, to name a few. To that list we can now add Staithes and Runswick Bay in Yorkshire, both just a few miles south of Saltburn-by-the-sea, but completely different in nature and aspect and both favoured villages of painters.

Staithes was where James Cook spent many of his early years before heading to Whitby to studying navigation under the masters. It was here that he worked for a general store merchant who provided goods for the fishermen, sailors, boat builders and fish merchants who lived and worked here. That wee shop, though, has long since slipped into the sea. The livelihood, at the time, was seafaring. The catch was cod and mackerel, lobster and crab. The village children and the womenfolk repaired the nets, baited hooks, and helped launch the fishing boats then waited for the menfolk to return.

Just two miles to the south was Runswick Bay, and like Staithes, its clutch of fishermen's cottages tumbled down the seaward side to the beach. Their houses were called 'cobles' after their boats and many were painted in bright and cheerful colours.

It was busy life. It was a traditional life. It was a life virtually unaffected by the world changing around them. The womenfolk often wore traditional dress, and in both villages women were famed for wearing a double crowned Staithes cap for special days, even right up into the 1960s. These crowns were useful for holding baskets of limpets they would collect for bait. It kept them stable on their heads. Limpet ladies were called 'flither pickers', and so traditional were the ways and lives of these village folk that there was little need to travel between them. So, their dialects stayed quite distinctive, old fashioned and unique; so much so that even strangers could easily tell the difference between folk from Staithes and folk from Runswick Bay. Their dialects were almost indecipherable to outsiders.

Painters at the time, in the 1880s, including those from the Paris academies, were searching for interesting villages and villagers to paint, which had distinctive customs and costumes. They soon discovered Staithes and Runswick Bay. They came in droves for decades to paint the traditional, and tended to ignore the few modernities that may have crept in over time, like railway cutting scenes.

Much, in those early painterly days, was made of the waterfront life and the characters that inhabited them. Only later did their works move into scenes of leisure, with more focus on the setting and surroundings. It was only when those surroundings changed character, when fishermen began to be replaced by iron miners, that the the influx of artists began to decline. Though even today painters are attracted here by the light that just seems trapped in these delightful little bays. So picturesque.