At Battersby station the trains arrive, stop, and then leave the way they came. The line ahead is single track, so before that section can be used the driver exchanges a token from a machine on the platform, a piece of Victorian railway safety still carried out in the open. It sets the tone for the whole place, which exists because of the railway.
The village is two terraces of workers' cottages, thirty in all, with two further houses, put up in 1875 for the men who kept the junction running. They were built of brick and most are now rendered, and they face the highway in a single line with farmland behind them. A water tower survives, along with a 1907 North Eastern Railway swing water column, a survival from the age of steam. The signal box has gone; traces of a third platform remain if you look for them.
Ingleby Junction opened here in 1858, where the Ingleby Mining Company's private line met the North Yorkshire and Cleveland Railway. Ironstone freight made it a busy junction. It became Battersby Junction in 1878 and plain Battersby in 1893, and one of its lines closed in the 1950s, which is why the passenger trains now reverse.
The station is unstaffed, with one platform in use, a shelter, and no waiting room, refreshments, toilets or car park. The approach road is unmade, uneven and often muddy, so anyone arriving by car should know that visitor parking here is scarce and the local roads are narrow. Trains run on Northern's Esk Valley route between Middlesbrough and Whitby. The buses that list Battersby are a permits-only school service and a Friday-only demand-responsive minibus, neither of which you can simply turn up for.
You won't find a pub or shop in the village itself, so the eating is done nearby. The Dudley Arms at Ingleby Greenhow is a seventeenth-century coaching inn that has stayed with the Staples family since 1969, with its own butchery and a menu that runs from a crispy flowering onion and glazed spare ribs to chargrilled tomapork with sticky-toffee apple sauce and a proper sticky toffee pudding. At Great Ayton, the Royal Oak does North Atlantic cod in beer batter, a pulled beef and Guinness pie, Whitby scampi and a chicken parmesan you can dress several ways; dogs are welcome in the Bistro Bar and the beer garden. For provisions, Fletchers Farm at Little Ayton is a five-generation family farm with a shop and coffee shop, where the butcher, Rod, makes his own South African-spiced biltong.
The walking is the reason to base yourself here. The Ingleby Incline route starts at the station and climbs the old mineral railway at a steady one-in-five gradient, about seven miles there and back with no stiles but plenty of rough ground; look along the way for the workers' carved initials and the benchmarks known as Stovepipe Hat and Bird Man.
Tim and Elly Hill moved into the converted station building with their three children in 2007, and volunteers have since added benches, planters, wildflowers and a bug hotel on the platform. "It's a peaceful and beautiful place," Tim says, "with ever-changing views of the hills."