Aislaby

The Forge, Then and Now

The Forge stands at 22 Main Road, and it has changed its name more than most pubs manage in three centuries. Before it settled on this one it traded as the Fox & Hounds, the Huntsman, the New Tavern and the New Inn. Today it is a family-run country inn, open-plan and renovated inside, cooking homemade food that recent visitors have rated above the ordinary. One diner called it "above the usual pub fayre," which is a fair summary of a kitchen recent visitors have reported serving sea bass, duck breast, chicken-and-leek pie and lemon tiramisu.

The regular cask beer is Black Sheep Best Bitter, with a single changing beer added over the summer. There is a garden, dogs are welcome, and the inn keeps rooms upstairs, so it is possible to eat, drink and sleep without leaving the one building the village agrees to call a pub.

Sandstone and the Descent to Sleights

Aislaby itself is a long line of stone houses along a hillside on the north side of the Esk Valley, all of them looking south across the river about three miles west of Whitby. The historic core is a conservation area inside the North York Moors National Park, reached by a side road that drops off the A171. The stone is coursed and squared sandstone, and it came out of the ground here. Aislaby Quarries supplied stone to Whitby Abbey from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, and later to Covent Garden, the foundations of the old Waterloo and London Bridges, and Whitby's own pier. The earthworks of the workings were still visible above the village in aerial photographs taken in 2009.

For everyday shopping you go down to Sleights, in the valley below, where Radford's is a family butcher selling locally sourced steaks, poultry and lamb alongside bakery goods and ready meals, and Botham's keeps a branch on Coach Road of the Whitby bakery Elizabeth Botham founded more than 150 years ago, with free parking opposite. The old way down is Featherbed Lane, a narrow track once claimed locally as Britain's narrowest King's Highway; it is about forty minutes from Sleights up to The Forge, continuously uphill, and a good deal easier taken the other way.

Arriving in Aislaby and St Margaret's

Sleights is also where the trains stop, on Northern's Esk Valley line between Middlesbrough and Whitby, a single step-free platform a kilometre or so from the pub. Arriva's X93 and X94 pass through Aislaby on the coast road if you would rather not walk the hill.

The Church of St Margaret had its foundation stone laid in 1896 and was completed the following year, replacing a plain chapel of 1732, which had itself replaced a medieval one. It is an aisleless cruciform church of squared stone with an apsidal chancel and a battlemented tower rising from the north transept, its stair turret round. The painted glass is by W. F. Curtis, Ward and Hughes and by Shrigley & Hunt. The 1732 chapel it succeeded still stands, now the parish hall where the council meets, its Venetian west window intact and its cupola long gone.

Farmhouses, Hall and Wartime Memory

Older still is Red House Farmhouse, dated 1692 over the door, its stone-mullioned windows now blocked. The Domesday surveyors knew the place as Asuluesbi and recorded it as waste, worth ten shillings and sevenpence twenty years earlier. Aislaby Hall, higher up, was taken over by the Army in the war and lost two officers, Major Bennett and Major Grigg, to a fire in January 1944; it was rebuilt in 1955 and has since turned up in Heartbeat.

The Old Causeway to the Esk

Strait Lane still follows the old causeway between the houses and the river, where a mill worked from the twelfth century until the nineteenth, with the whole village on the slope above.