Battersby has no pub, no conventional shop and no church in the hamlet, so the first thing to fix on is smaller than any of those: a red letterbox set into the byre beside Holme Farmhouse, still carrying the cipher of Edward VII. The farmhouse itself is early-to-mid-eighteenth-century, later heightened, built of coursed herringbone-tooled stone under red pantiles, with sash windows and a separate roadside cart lodge. A short way off, High Farmhouse repeats the same herringbone stonework and hides a braced king-post roof truss and a chamfered cross-beam in its cart lodge. Both are listed. Between them runs the beck, and the ford across it is the hamlet's central feature.
Keep this place separate in your mind from Battersby Junction, which is a different thing a little way down the road: a brick railway settlement rather than a sandstone farming one. There was nothing there at all in 1850. The station opened in 1858 as Ingleby Junction, became Battersby Junction in 1878 and plain Battersby in 1893, and a North Eastern Railway water column from 1907 still stands where it once swung out to fill steam locomotives. The station is on the Esk Valley line between Middlesbrough and Whitby, unstaffed, with a shelter and little else; the walk up from the car park is unmade and often muddy, and no frequent bus calls at the station, though a demand-responsive service runs through on Fridays. Crowds did gather here in March 2016 when the Flying Scotsman came through.
Above the junction runs the old Rosedale Railway incline, which carried ironstone down an average gradient of one in five and a half between 1861 and 1929. Runaway wagons killed people. During the war the Royal Engineers destroyed the features at the top so they could not point enemy aircraft towards the works at Teesside, and what remains now is track bed, with stone, brick, timber and metal, some of it buried. The Ingleby Greenhow circular walk passes this way: seven and a half miles with about 160 metres of climb, starting near the Dudley Arms and threading forestry tracks and field paths beneath Battersby Moor. Take OS Explorer OL26, and expect the second half's paths to be harder to follow.
For everything you cannot get in Battersby, the neighbours provide. The Dudley Arms at Ingleby Greenhow is a seventeenth-century coaching inn, owned by the Staples family since Craig and Betty bought it in 1969. Steaks are butchered in-house, and the menu runs to oysters, game and a much-advertised flowering onion; Café 1756 does breakfasts and sweet things alongside. One visitor, Donna Skelton, called it a "cosy, relaxing atmosphere," and another singled out the spare ribs and sticky toffee pudding. Seasonal Salads works out of Battersby Junction with fortnightly vegetable boxes, Fletcher's Farm at Little Ayton adds a coffee shop and a children's play park to its own meat, and Petch's in Great Ayton has built a reputation on its pies.
The parish church is St Andrew's at Ingleby Greenhow, Grade I, Norman at its core, with arcade capitals carved into heads and animals and the effigy of a priest, Willimus Wrelton, who held the living around 1300. Domesday records Battersby as Badresbi, in Langbaurgh, with not a single household counted.