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The oldest resort in the country, SCARBOROUGH first attracted early seventeenth-century visitors to its newly discovered mineral springs. Fashionable among the Victorians-to whom it was "the Queen of the Watering Places" - Scarborough saw its biggest transformation after World War II, when it became a holiday haven for workers from the industrial heartlands. All the traditional ingredients of a beach resort are here in force, from superb, clean sands, kitsch amusement arcades and Kiss-Me-Quick hats to the more refined pleasures of its tightknit old-town streets and a genteel round of quiet parks and gardens. There's no better place to acquaint yourself with the local layout than from the walls of Scarborough Castle (April-Oct daily 10am-6pm; Nov-March Wed-Sun 10am-1pm & 2-4pm; GBP2.50; EH), mounted on a jutting headland between two golden-sanded bays east of the town centre. Bronze and Iron Age relics have been found on the wooded castle crag, together with fragments of a fourth-century Roman signalling station, Saxon and Norman chapels and a Viking camp, reputedly built by a Viking with the nickname of Scardi (or "harelip"), from which the town's name derives. The present castle consists mainly of a three-storey keep dating from the twelfth century, and a thirteenth-century barbican and raking buttressed walls which trace the cliff edge. As you leave the castle, drop into the church of St Mary (1180), immediately below on Castle Road, whose graveyard contains the tomb of Anne Bronte, who died here in 1849. The town museums are clustered around Valley Road, south of the train station. A "Museum S Pass" (GBP2; valid for a year) gets you into the Victorian Wood End on The Crescent (June-Sept Tues-Sun 10am-5pm; Oct-May Wed, Sat & Sun 11am-4pm), holiday home of the Sitwell family of writers and aesthetes, the adjacent Art Gallery (June-Sept Tues-Sun 10am-5pm; Oct-May Thurs, Fri & Sat 11am-4pm) and the nearby Rotunda Museum on Vernon Road (June-Sept Tues-Sun 10am-5pm; Oct-April Tues, Sat & Sun 11am-4pm), which holds the local archeological and historic finds. Most of what passes for family entertainment takes place on the North Bay - massive water slides at Atlantis, the kids' amusements at Kinderland, and the miniature North Bay Railway (daily Easter-Sept), which runs up to the most educational of the lot, the Sea Life Centre , with its pools of flounders, rock-pool habitats and fishy exhibits. The South Bay is more refined, backed by the pleasant Valley Gardens and the Italianate meanderings of the South Cliff Gardens, and topped by an esplanade from which a hydraulic lift (daily 10am-4pm, till 10pm July & Aug) putters down to the beach. Here, Scarborough's Regency and Victorian glories are still evident in hotels like the Crown and, most impressively of all, the Grand Hotel built in 1867.
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