Ainthorpe

The Green and the Old Inn

The green opposite the Fox & Hounds has quoits pitches, sheep grazing between them and a row of picnic tables at the front. The pub across the road is the only one in Ainthorpe, and the inn dates its building to 1555, which makes it the oldest in the area.

Inside there is a bar, a lounge and dining rooms, with ten en-suite bedrooms upstairs and eight heated glamping pods in the grounds. Dogs are welcome in the bar and lounge but not in the main restaurant, and well-behaved ones can stay overnight. There is secure cycle storage and a drying room, which tells you what the weather does here.

Food Below the Rigg

The menu is unusually broad for a village pub. A summer one runs from Thai soft-shell-crab salad and beef-brisket croquettes to Aji-spiced lamb skewers, chicken schnitzel, a cheese-stuffed Kransky sausage and Mexican sweetcorn ribs, with saffron and pesto rosso pappardelle for anyone avoiding meat. Sunday brings roast beef or chicken alongside porchetta, a venison burger and pan-fried stone bass, and you finish with sticky ginger parkin or rhubarb-and-custard cheesecake. The inn pours cask-conditioned Yorkshire ales that change with what is available.

The village itself is mostly one plot deep, a line of houses along Brook Lane and Ainthorpe Lane with later additions spreading up Strait Lane, Easton Lane and Valley View. Above it, Ainthorpe Rigg climbs from around 230 metres to a 300-metre plateau, dropping steeply into the dales on either side.

Arrival and Dale Provisions

One option is the Esk Valley line. Danby station, on the route between Middlesbrough and Whitby, is about a twenty-minute walk; it is unstaffed and step-free, with no toilets or refreshments, so bring what you need. By road the pub reckons it seventeen miles from Whitby, and in summer the Moorsbus network reaches Danby.

For food to take back, the health shop in Danby, run by volunteers from the Esk Valley Camphill Community, sells organic vegetables, supplements and bread from a connected bakery. Out towards Lealholm, Wild Slack Farm keeps a card-payment vending machine stocked with frozen steak, sausages, dry-cured bacon and joints from the Foord family's grass-fed Shorthorns, Oxford Sandy and Black pigs and Blackface sheep.

Trods, Cairns and Castle

Walkers have the rigg immediately above them. Two medieval trods cross it, marked by undressed standing stones set roughly eighty metres apart: Church Way heads towards St Hilda's, while the Old Wives Stones Way runs down the spine into Ainthorpe. The high ground carries a scheduled prehistoric landscape of more than seven hundred clearance cairns, ring cairns and a round-barrow cemetery, one of which gave up two Bronze Age cremation urns when it was excavated.

A gentle two-mile circular from Danby Lodge takes in Danby Castle, a wealthy fourteenth-century manor house rather than a fortress, where Katharine Parr lived before she married Henry VIII. The walk returns over Duck Bridge, a narrow humpbacked crossing first built in 1396 and rebuilt by George Duck. When the Domesday surveyors came through, one holding had fallen from three pounds to three shillings within twenty years, and both holdings were recorded as waste.

A Gothic Schoolhouse

Danby School still stands on Yall Flat Lane, sandstone and Gothic, with pointed windows, a coat-of-arms niche and an owl hole cut into one gable.