Beck Hole

Three Flagstones and a Valley

The sweet shop at the Birch Hall Inn measures three flagstones across the floor. It sits between the pub's two bars, the Big Bar on one side and the smaller Little Bar on the other, and it still sells Sherbet Dabs, Pontefract Cakes and Imps, weighed out on old scales against a four-ounce weight. There are ice creams and postcards too. Shop, pub and tearoom occupy the one limewashed building, and for practical purposes that building is most of Beck Hole.

The hamlet is a compact group of sandstone cottages at the foot of a steep wooded valley, with open moorland immediately to the east. It gathers around a green, a stone bridge and small falls. A red K6 telephone box stands near the inn; dry-stone walls and stone steps run between the houses; a tall Scots pine marks Firtree Cottage.

The Inn Time Kept

The pub's nationally important historic interior retains its old-fashioned character. The Big Bar keeps a working gas lamp for power cuts, and some of the tables came out of the waiting room at the old Beck Hole Halt. The short food menu has sandwiches, pork pies and beer cake. Payment is cash only because the phone signal comes and goes. The house beer, Beckwatter, is brewed locally; Wold Top Bitter is the regular cask, with a changing Yorkshire guest beside it. There is real cider all year and perry in summer. Dogs are welcome. There is seating at the front and a larger garden at the back, above the Murk Esk.

The building is Grade II listed. The main whitewashed portion dates from the mid or late eighteenth century; Ralph and Mary Dowson added the hammered-sandstone extension in the mid-nineteenth, when the Victorian block held a shop and lodgings for workers arriving in the 1860s. The Little Bar was carved out of part of that shop only after the Second World War. Mrs Schofield ran the inn for fifty-three years, and when she sold it in 1981 she made her buyers promise to keep it as it was. The inn sign was painted and given by Algernon Newton, a Royal Academician who spent the war here.

From Furnaces to Footpaths

The quiet is a kind of accident. Beck Hole Ironworks and its mines opened in 1859, and for a short time the valley held furnaces, quarries, worker housing and a steep cable-worked railway. The publicity in 1860 was ambitious. Within thirty years the works and the cottages had been demolished.

The old railway is now something to walk. The Rail Trail runs three and a half miles from Goathland through Beck Hole to Grosmont, following the route George Stephenson laid out in 1836; you pass ironworking remains and the former incline, which was worked by rope and gravity-fed water tanks on a gradient of one in fifteen. You can take a North Yorkshire Moors Railway train one way and walk the other. A shorter three-mile circuit from Goathland links Mallyan Spout with Beck Hole, and from the hamlet itself a path leads through old woodland to the Thomason Foss waterfall.

Goathland Connections

Goathland, about a mile away, has the heritage station, and selected Coastliner 840 journeys serve it on the way to Whitby. St Mary's Church was built in the 1890s by York architect Walter Brierley, who wanted for it "simplicity, breadth and sturdiness." The lanes into Beck Hole are minor ones; the nearest main road, the A169, runs near Goathland.

Quoits Behind the Inn

Behind the inn, the quoits club still plays, pitching iron rings at a pin set in the ground, much as it did before the furnaces came and long after they went.