Walk into Craster and the smell hits before the harbour does. Oak smoke, heavy and sweet, rolls down from L. Robson and Sons' smokehouse and settles over the village like weather. Robsons have been curing herring here since 1856, splitting the fish in half and threading them onto wooden tenter sticks before hanging them for sixteen hours over slow oak fires. The result is the Craster kipper, the village's single most exported piece of culinary identity, served in white-tableclothed dining cars and in tin cafes from Edinburgh to London. The harbour itself is small: a stone breakwater, a row of fishing cottages, a path north along the cliffs to a ruined castle.
Craster sits inside the Northumberland Coast Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, on a stretch of shoreline shaped by a 295-million-year-old intrusion of igneous rock called the Whin Sill. The sill is the same dark hard basalt that supports Hadrian's Wall further south and the ruins of Bamburgh, Dunstanburgh, and Lindisfarne. South of the village it rises into the basaltic cliffs of Cullernose Point, a kittiwake nesting colony in summer. North of the village a footpath runs along the rocky shore for about a mile and a half until it reaches the ruins of Dunstanburgh Castle, a 14th-century fortress that the Earl of Lancaster began in 1313 on a promontory dropping 100 feet straight into the North Sea. The walk between Craster and Dunstanburgh is among the best-loved coastal walks in England, partly because of the views and partly because most people end it with a kipper sandwich and a pint.
The harbour was built between 1904 and 1906 by the Craster family as a memorial to Captain John Charles Pulleine Craster, killed during the Younghusband Expedition in Tibet on 28 June 1904. A small commemorative plaque on the harbour wall records the dedication. The stone for the breakwater came from a quarry just behind the village, where local whinstone was excavated for road kerbs and railway ballast and shipped out by sea. An overhead aerial cableway carried the stone from the quarry face directly onto waiting boats. The remains of the loading tower still stand at the harbour's end, looking like a stubby chimney, though the quarry itself is now a National Trust car park. Stone left this harbour for decades; now visitors arrive in cars and walk back out along the cliff path.
A small distance inland sits Craster Tower, the seat of the Craster family who were lords of the manor of Craster for many centuries. The current Georgian house incorporates a medieval pele tower, the kind of fortified house built across this border country in the 14th and 15th centuries when Scottish raids were a regular threat. A mile west stands Dunstan Hall, another mansion built around a pele tower and now used as holiday accommodation. During the Second World War the cliffs above the village, known locally as the Heughs, were the site of a Coastal Defence and Chain Home radar station. The radar mast watched the North Sea for German bombers, and Historic England added the surviving installation to its protected list in 2023 as one of the best-preserved examples of Britain's wartime coastal defence network.
The village has a permanent population of about four hundred. Most summer weekends, perhaps a thousand walkers tramp through, drawn by the coastal path, the castle ruin, the smokehouse, and the small National Trust car park that serves as the village's main entrance. Robsons' shop sells smoked kippers in vacuum packs by the kilo, and the Jolly Fisherman pub does kipper paste on toast that hardcore visitors order in addition to the kipper sandwich at the smokehouse cafe. Three meals built around one fish. The lifeboat station, established by the RNLI in 1969, sits at the West End of the harbour and still answers callouts to fishing boats, dinghies, and the occasional swimmer caught by tides off the Whin Sill rocks. Craster is the kind of small place that knows what it is and has stopped worrying about it: a harbour, a smokehouse, a path to a castle.
Craster sits at 55.47 degrees north, 1.60 degrees west, on the Northumberland coast about 8 miles north-east of Alnwick. From the air the small stone harbour, the dark basalt cliffs of the Whin Sill, and the unmistakable silhouette of Dunstanburgh Castle a mile and a half north together form one of the most distinctive stretches of coastline on the English east coast. Newcastle International (EGNT) is roughly 40 miles south. Best viewing at lower altitudes in clear conditions, when the harbour walls, the coastal path, and the castle ruins are all visible together against the North Sea.