A week in Filey – July 2009

As our blog was broken from around the time we got back from our holiday last July, I never got around to writing about it. So here’s a few quick thoughts about it.

This was our first holiday with Skitters. In recent years we’ve often spent our summer holidays in the UK, preferring to head further afield for snowboarding holidays. This year we would do no different. But, we did need to consider some new things. We needed it to be dog friendly (obviously), we needed it to have a garden of some description, and ideally we needed it to be somewhere we could walk the dog.

As a child I spent summer holidays on the East Coast, mostly in Bridlington but often with day trips further afield to Whitby, Robin Hood’s Bay and Filey. I remember these trips with fondness, and have always had a particular soft spot for Robin Hood’s Bay. Richard had visited a few of these places with me and my family years ago, but neither of us had really explored under our own steam. Filey has a very long, sandy beach which is mostly dog friendly (only the bit closest to Filey itself isn’t) and stretches from Filey down to Hunmanby.

We found ourselves a lovely house in The Bay estate (on the grounds of the old Butlins camp) which was so dog friendly it even had dog bowls. They had a no dogs upstairs restriction which was fine as they’d provided a child gate to put on the stairs – without this we might have struggled somewhat 🙂

The Bay, Filey

The Bay estate is still being worked on, and looks to have quite a lot of space still available to it. The pub was open, and a couple of shops but there are still quite a few opportunities for development which I believe to be underway. The walk from the house to the beach was about 1km and this delivered us at a good dog-friendly stretch of beach (as long as the tide was out – at high tide there is no beach at all).

Looking towards Filey

Our adventures took us all around the area including a visit to Dane’s Dyke beach (listed on the Times list of Top 10 dog-friendly beaches) , a walk into Dalby Forest (I remember a school trip there as a child), visits to Staithes, Robin Hood’s Bay, Runswick Bay and even along a bit of the Coast to Coast walk. It was a great trip and an excellent first holiday with a dog in tow.

Skitters on Dane's Dyke beach

Runswick Bay

More photos of our adventures can be found here

Author: jane

Software Developer, Photographer and Snowboarder