Tall tales and true: of Yorkshire moors and the byways of Surrey: Scarborough Fair

We are still hunting down decent morning coffee, but without success. Today's brew was just a few steps from Cliff House one of the earlier guest houses in this part of town, just a short distance uphill from our apartment with its view. Cliff House now has a restaurant called Charlotte's of Filey, for it was here that Charlotte Bronte used to regularly stay, seeking rejuvenating sea air and and salt water from the time her sister, Ann, died in Scarborough in 1849, until her own death, too soon after, in 1855. Unknown at the time, the Bronte's water in the Howarth rectory, where they lived with their father, had become quite toxic, leaching downhill from the bones in the graveyard beside the rectory. All the Bronte children were to die young, as did so many of the townsfolk at the time.

Anne Bronte's well trodden grave and headstone is barely 10 miles away from Filey, in Scarborough, in one of the most beautiful spots in town. It is set high on a hill with glorious views of the sea, the elegant spa town, and the remains of the castle. It is one of the most visited spots in a town that itself is well visited. Dozens of folk came and went, remembering Anne, in the short while we were there this morning.

Probably my favourite seaside town in all of England is Scarborough. Which, like so many places around here, seems to have its beginnings in northern culture: 'borough' likely coming from the word 'burgh'. Although, the Romans, much earlier, had built one of their signal stations on this very hill, as they had in Filey. Yet still the barbarians came. As William the Conqueror was landing in the south in 1066, so was Harald Hardrada, the invader Viking from the north, landing here, and making inroads into this part of the country. Just a hundred years later, a fortified castle was built where once the Romans lit fires warning that invaders were nigh. Remnants of that castle keep are still clearly visible today and expansive walls surrounding the entire hill show the extent to which the castle grew over the next couple of centuries.

As the population in and around the castle grew, so, too, did the markets. Scarborough became a thriving little place filled with fisherman, sailors and wool exporters, and was soon honoured with its own Annual Fayre in 1253, making it an important and busy market town of considerable consequence.

Are you going to Scarborough Fayre?

But, its heyday, had to wait a few hundred years more, and is probably thanks to a Mrs Thomasin Farrer, the wife of the town Bailiff. She discovered a fresh water spring, enriched with magnesium sulphate it was later discovered, bubbling from the side of a hill. Partaking of it, and finding it beneficial, she soon touted it to her friends, and the word spread rapidly. Once the local doctor had put in writing that the waters were known to cure anything from flatulence to scurvy to all ills, there was no stopping the influx. The town boomed. Elegant spas were constructed, graceful hotels mushroomed, and long lines of elegant white houses in crescents were built around the curving waterfront. Only the most fashionable could afford to come to Scarborough to 'take the waters'. And come they did.

Today, Scarborough is still stylishly beautiful in an olde worlde manner. As we walked along the waterfront we could hear an orchestra playing popular classical ditties. This was coming from a outdoor venue at the magnificent Scarborough Spa set of buildings along the seafront that has been operating here for some 160 years.

There is an open air rotunda decorated in blue striped deck chairs set about a checkerboard tiled floor. Patrons sit out under the golden sun, cocooned behind glass partitions set in decorative colonnades and pillars, separating paying guests from the nonpaying observers. It is all very last century, and delightfully old-fashioned. As well, there is a concert hall, a theatre, a ballroom, a restaurant, a bar, and Victorian tramway up and down the cliff. And that is just for starters. Guests can learn to dance under the stars to visiting keyboard musicians, or dress to the gills and dance up a storm on gala nights, and at grand and gracious balls, as in days of yore.

Then, when the days become too close for comfort, they can migrate down to their beach chalets where they can spend the day 'taking the waters' from the shelter of their very own coloured little changing cottages. That is all still happening here.