Appleton-le-Moors

Stone faces and the surviving inn

Above a doorway opposite the Village Hall, three stone faces look down at the street: a priest, a doctor and a lawyer, carved to represent blood suckers. They preside over a village that has kept its single long street more or less unchanged for a century while quietly losing almost everything else. The three shops, the post office, the blacksmith, the fish-and-chip shop and the brass band, whose drum was kept in the Village Hall, have all gone.

What remains is worth the drive out. The Moors Inn has traded as an inn since the seventeenth century and still runs to an open fire, a bar, a snug, a dining room and eight rooms upstairs. The kitchen keeps to substantial cooking: a steak pie of diced beef, mushrooms and local ale; a rack of lamb with minted mash and redcurrant-and-port gravy; pork fillet with a mushroom, shallot and black-pudding duxelles; battered haddock; a Thai red vegetable curry; a four-cheese soufflé; and a ploughman's built around pork pie, ham, Cheddar, pickles and chutney. The regular cask ale is Bradfield Farmers Brown Cow, with beers from Helmsley and elsewhere changing alongside it. Dogs are welcome in the bar and the bedrooms, though not the dining room. One former customer, Joy King, described it as a "lovely peaceful village pub with free grazing sheep roaming."

Community rooms and medieval garths

There is no permanent shop now, but on the third Sunday morning of each growing-season month the Village Hall hosts the Appleton Produce Exchange, where residents bring, buy, sell and swap home-grown vegetables, flowers, jams, cakes and crafts over tea, coffee and toasted teacakes. Profits are divided between the hall, the church and the Reading Room. That last building is worth finding: a corrugated-iron room put up in 1911 for seventy-five pounds as an alcohol-free space with books, newspapers and a three-quarter-size billiard table, now restored and given over to film nights, talks and yoga.

The village stands about four hundred feet up on a limestone slope west of the River Seven, its street running back into broad verges still grazed by livestock. The cottages are eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stone under red pantile and slate; behind them run garths about three hundred and thirty feet long, the shape St Mary's Abbey imposed when it reorganised the settlement in the twelfth century.

Pearson's moorland church

At the top of the street sits Christ Church, built in 1863–65 by J. L. Pearson for Mary Shepherd, in memory of her husband Joseph, a village-born shipowner who had made his fortune and come home to build Appleton Hall. A High Victorian Gothic church of dressed limestone with a square tower and pyramidal spire, it keeps its original pulpit, font, richly painted organ and bands of inlaid Rosedale ironstone.

The long way round

The walking starts at the door. A ten-mile circuit crosses the Tabular Hills to Hutton-le-Hole, with its open-air Ryedale Folk Museum, then on past Mary Magdalene Well to Lastingham before the steep return through Hell Bank Wood. Headlands Road drops down to the A170 between Helmsley and Pickering; Malton, about 13.6 miles off, is the nearest railway station, and the 174 and 176S community buses run from Kirkbymoorside.

Music above the verges

For two weeks each August the North York Moors Chamber Music Festival makes its home here, and the sheep on the verges carry on regardless.