Journalist Martin Wainwright’s first really vivid glimpse of the Yorkshire coast came from the broken mouth of Slam Gutter, a derelict alum works drain near Ravenscar.

He and his brothers and sisters had already been playing with a bucket and spade on the beaches at Ravenscar and Sandsend. But they were just beaches.

When the children scrambled into that derelict drain up on the heights, they got an entirely different view.

“My brothers, sisters and I squeezed into it, encouraged by a glimmer of light at the far end,” writes Wainwright, the northern editor of The Guardian. “To our amazed delight, this turned out to be an airy ledge where the narrow passage’s stonework crumbled away completely, halfway down the cliff.”

Even better, there were tiny fossils around the cracked lips of the gutter. “It began a lifelong relish of the drama, excitement and secrecy behind our county’s mighty but unstable shore.”

Mr Wainwright is one of ten well-known writers who have come together to write personal accounts of their memories of or love affairs with the Yorkshire coast and its resorts for a new book: Edge Of Heaven.

Each focuses on a different bit of that coast. For Margaret Drabble – who went to school in York – it is Filey “for me the most numinous place on earth”.

The town has changed since her family holidays there as a child many years ago. But not as much as most towns of its size, she writes. “It survives, astonishingly, and its mood is much as when I first saw it. The sea comes and goes, the waves break against the smooth blocks of the majestically curved sea wall, and the wide bay stretches from headland to headland.

“The children play on the sands and swim in the shallows, and the fishing boats bob on the deeper waters.”

Writer Blake Morrison recalls a teenage romantic encounter in Scarborough, RJ Ellory writes about Whitby’s hidden history, and former Dalesman editor David Joy about Port Mulgrave, Yorkshire’s ‘lost port’. Roy Hattersley, meanwhile, recaptures the joys of childhood holidays at Hornsea and Withernsea.

In those days, he writes, the holiday resorts of the Yorkshire coast had their own pecking order. “Scarborough – with two bays and many big hotels – claimed top place. Filey came a good second, tying with Whitby, which had less refinement but more charm.” At the bottom of the heap was Bridlington, where the “wholly justified reputation for being cheap and cheerful was enough to keep its landladies content”.

But if Bridlington was bottom of the pile, where were Hornsea and Withernsea? They didn’t even figure in the social league table, Mr Hattersley writes.

“Hardly heard of outside the county and mostly patronised by Hull, they kept to themselves in proper Yorkshire fashion and got on with their own business. They still do.”

The down-to-earth nature of the resorts is demonstrated by a notice at Withernsea posted up by the town council warning children to play safe, Mr Hattersley writes. It goes on: “The sea is not a swimming pool. Life guards do not protect this beach.” And yet both towns, and their beaches, are full of surprises, Mr Hattersley writes. “Perhaps the greatest – and certainly the most important – is that the old-fashioned summer holiday has not quite passed into history. The two towns have changed with the years. But faint echoes of a more innocent past remain… Enjoy them while you can.”

Lavishly illustrated with some stunning photographs of the Yorkshire coast, Edge of Heaven – a large, coffee table-sized book that runs to 190 sumptuous pages – is a joyful celebration of the charms and idiosyncracies of the Yorkshire coast and its seaside towns, in the company of some of our finest writers. A treat.

• Edge of Heaven: The Yorkshire Coast, edited by Lee Hanson with an introduction by Selena Scott, is published by Great Norther NBooks, priced £19.99. It is officially launched at the Great Yorkshire Show on Thursday.