Hunmanby: The Whisky Distillery, the Old Market Town and Getting There from Scarborough

Hunmanby is a large village and civil parish on the edge of the Yorkshire Wolds, inland from the coast between Filey and Bridlington. It had 3,132 residents at the 2011 census. It belonged to the East Riding of Yorkshire until 1974, then to the Scarborough district until that district was abolished in 2023.

This is not a seaside trip, and the village does not trade on its looks. The reason people come out from Scarborough is a whisky distillery on the industrial estate — the first in Yorkshire — attached to a working village that was once the main market town for the whole East Riding, and reachable by an hourly train.

Wikipedia puts Hunmanby 9 miles (14 km) south of Scarborough, 3 miles (4.8 km) south-west of Filey and 9 miles (14 km) north of Bridlington; the straight-line distance from Scarborough is 12.5 km. The village stands on the Centenary Way.

Yorkshire’s first whisky distillery, on an industrial estate

In 2017 the owners of the nearby Wold Top Brewery opened Yorkshire’s first whisky distillery on Hunmanby Industrial Estate. The Spirit of Yorkshire Distillery carries 4.9 from 319 Google reviews, far and away the best-rated thing in the village, and for most visitors it is the trip.

There are tours, a café and a shop. The café is busier than its setting suggests: a visitor in June 2026 “visited on a weekday lunchtime and was lucky to get a seat, almost full”, with “a view into the distillery whilst you eat”. The same visitor called the shop “Small but well stocked”, selling the distillery’s own whisky alongside beer from Wold Top, the sister brewery down the road.

Evening events are not an à la carte affair. A visitor in June 2026 wrote of the music nights that “it is a fixed menu so be sure it suits your requirements”, and added the obvious caveat about the place: “They specialise in whisky if you enjoy that sort of drink”.

The practical warning is about arriving at the right building. A visitor in July 2026 booked a tour here and set off for a gin distillery in Filey instead, and came away with the advice to “always check the postcode on your ticket before setting off”. They rang ahead, were told it was not a problem and joined once they arrived.

The market cross, Castle Hill and the halls

The name is Danish. Domesday recorded it in 1086 as Hundemanbi, the farmstead of the hounds men, after the hunting down of wolves on the Wolds; the village is said to be the last place in England where King Stephen kept his wolfhounds.

William the Conqueror gave the manor to Gilbert de Gant, who built a castle here. It was destroyed at the Battle of Hunmanby by William le Gros, Earl of York, and Eustace fitz John, Constable of Chester, during the civil war known as the Anarchy, and the ground it stood on is now called Castle Hill. De Gant himself lived outside the town in a house named Le Burlyn — Old French for wool house — thought to have stood where Low Hall is now; his son Walter founded Bridlington Priory. The manor grew into one of the most powerful in the north of England, until the hereditary Lords sold the estate off piece by piece at the end of the 19th century. It had passed from the Osbaldestons, who held it from the 1620s to the 1830s, by inheritance to the Mitfords, among them the novelist Bertram Mitford.

Hunmanby Market Cross survives from the market-town years. Hunmanby Hall, a Queen Anne building, replaced the 11th-century Low Hall on higher ground, and its lodge and gateway were built from stone taken from Filey Brigg. The Methodist Education Committee bought the Hall and reopened it in April 1928 as a girls’ boarding school with room for 300; it closed in 1991, and a nine-hole golf course occupies the site now. All Saints’ Church is partly 12th century, standing where a Saxon church is believed to have stood before it, renovated in 1845 and grade II* listed. Hunmanby Pinfold and Lockup is also listed as an attraction, at 4.7 from only 3 Google reviews, which is not a rating worth acting on.

The chariot burial and what turns up in the fields

A landslip in 1907 exposed a British chariot burial of the 1st or 2nd century BC, the chariot buried horse and all. A tumulus on a local farm was opened up and found to hold 15 skeletons. Roman pottery, flint axes and arrowheads are found frequently in and around the village.

An industrial village, not a scenic one

For its size Hunmanby carries a lot of industry: Deep Sea Electronics, Cirrus Research, Hunprenco, Peninsula Group, Barcodereaders.com, the Apollo Group and the Beck Engineering Group all operate here. Beck Engineering made the dinosaurs for Blackgang Chine on the Isle of Wight, which featured on Blue Peter. The village was once home to the Solar Dome greenhouse company, which made a geodetic dome-shaped greenhouse, and to one of only two car manufacturers in Yorkshire in 1911.

The village also holds a television transmitter, relaying to Filey, Bridlington and villages that cannot pick up Oliver’s Mount or Belmont, and a terminal for the VSNL Northern Europe submarine telecommunications cable, which runs to De Marne in the Netherlands. An autograss track runs just outside the village, where the actress and radio presenter Roxanne Pallett crashed while racing in 2018. Hunmanby FC, an amateur club founded in 2025, won promotion from the East Riding County League Division Five in 2025–26.

Getting there from Scarborough

The train is the straightforward option. Hunmanby railway station sits on the Yorkshire Coast Line between Hull and Scarborough and has been open since October 1847, when the line first ran. Services are hourly in each direction, and the station occupies an isolated two-track section of an otherwise largely single line between Bridlington and Seamer.

By bus, an hourly service between Bridlington and Scarborough serves the village, and Wikipedia also records a one-day stopping coach service between Scarborough and London calling at a holiday park east of the village on the A165 at Hunmanby Moor. That park was the Filey Butlin’s resort, and it had its own spur off the Scarborough to Hull railway until the line to it closed in 1977.

By road, the A165 bypasses Hunmanby by 1 mile (1 km) to the east. Before it was built, the village stood on the main coaching road between Scarborough and Hull.