Yorkshire

Yorkshire's coast runs from the cliffs at Saltburn down past Whitby and the abbey, on to Scarborough and Filey Bay, and finishes at the chalk headland of Flamborough Head and the long Holderness sand cliffs that erode southwards to Spurn Point. The tide here runs the classic North Sea signature: cleanly semidiurnal, two highs and two lows of comparable size each day, twelve and a half hours apart. Mean range at Whitby is about 4.2 metres, climbing toward 5 on spring tides. The Jurassic Coast shelf between Whitby and Robin Hood's Bay opens up at the lowest spring tides for fossil-hunting and tidepooling. The wide sand at Whitby Sands, Sandsend, and Scarborough's North and South Bays widens by tens of metres on the low. Whitby's harbour dries to a thin channel at every spring low and small craft moor on the foreshore knowing they will sit on mud for hours. The Holderness cliff coast retreats by metres each year — the fastest-eroding coast in Europe — and the tide undermines new cliff faces continually. UK Hydrographic Office Admiralty TotalTide is the authoritative British tide product.