[2] Located at the mouth of the River Aln, the village had a port supporting a small fishing industry and engaging in national and international trade.

These activities to some extent shaped the village, as granaries were constructed to store grain, and sawmills and a boatyard established to process wood and build ships.

A notable change in the course of the river during a violent storm in 1806 resulted in the loss of the remains of the village's original church and disruption to the functioning of the port and industries.

With the coming of the railways, Alnmouth transformed into a coastal resort complete with one of the earliest English golf courses, a holiday camp, bathing houses, beach huts and spacious sea-view villas.

In contemporary times, Alnmouth is a well conserved picturesque coastal resort and tourist attraction, lying within the Northumberland Coast Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

[5][6] What preceded the Norman village is less clear, although land at the mouth of the river is likely to have been used throughout antiquity,[7] coastal plains being some of the first areas of recorded human settlement in Britain.

Alnmouth harbour would have been useful to the Romans, both to support military campaigns and to facilitate trade,[10][11] albeit the river is not navigable beyond Lesbury, 3.2 kilometres (2.0 mi) upstream.

Other exports noted in this period are coal, and eggs, pork and pickled salmon for the London trade, and wool for the Yorkshire woolen industry.

A violent storm breached the northern end of the Church Hill sandbank, allowing the river to divert away from a south–north meander to take a more direct course to the sea.

[27] A links golf course was established in 1869, the fourth oldest in England; it is believed that it was designed by Mungo Park who became the club's first professional.

Similar invasion fears arose during World War II, and a variety of defences were installed on the south and north beaches at Alnmouth, including concrete anti-tank cubes, an anti-tank ditch, pill-boxes, reinforcement of the previous century's gun battery, and firing slits built into the walls of the Church Hill guano shed.

[34] The geology of the North East of England around Alnmouth is a superficial layer of glacial till in the form of boulder clay lying on often outcropping Whin Sill, a carboniferous limestone, with peat deposits, and, at the coast, wind-blown sand including a coastline dune system which has evolved over the last 10,000 years.

The coastline of the county is a series of headlands and bays — such as at Alnmouth — with wide, sandy beaches, the result of differential erosion of ice-age deposits.

Its hinterland is an open agricultural landscape of arable land and pasture, with broadleaf woodlands in river valleys such as of the Aln, and some forestry plantations.

[43] Further south, the first edition Ordnance Survey map of the area shows a bathhouse on Buston links associated with 'sandpits' — apparently bathing holes — drilled into the outcropping stone on the beach, and presumably evidence of the Victorian Spa movement.

This link was developed in 1856 when the Hipsburn bridge crossing the River Aln was constructed to support a direct connection with the new railway station.