Borrowby

A Hamlet Above the Fields

Outside Ivy Cottage, a strip of old stone trod runs along the ground. Borrowby is a single-road hamlet that sits slightly higher than the farmland around it, close enough to the coast that on a clear day the North Sea shows as a grey line beyond the ridge-and-furrow fields.

Borrowby itself has no pub, no shop and no church. What Borrowby has instead is itself: sandstone farmhouses under gabled pantile roofs, tall hedges, grassy verges and dry-stone walls, and a run of barns and byres that have quietly become houses. Ivy Cottage and Borrowby Farm still keep their painted timber sash windows where many other openings have gone over to uPVC.

Farmsteads and Bergebi

The village grew up around two working farms, High Farm and Borrowby Farm, with Low Borrowby Farm set apart, and its mid-nineteenth-century layout has changed very little. North of Plum Tree Farmhouse there is a barn and gin-gang, its half-octagonal horse-engine house still holding the main beam and drive shaft that once turned by horsepower. Plum Tree Farmhouse itself is late-eighteenth-century, with tripartite sash windows.

Domesday knew the place as Bergebi. It was worth two pounds a year to its lord in 1066, held then by Swein; by 1086 it had passed to Nigel Fossard under Robert of Mortain and was recorded as waste. Seven ploughlands, eight acres of meadow and a stretch of woodland measured half a league by one furlong: that was the whole of it.

Down to the Coast Road

For most things you go down to the coast road. The A174 runs through Hinderwell and Staithes. The Fox & Hounds at Dalehouse is in a wooded valley, with two bars, an open fire and a woodstove, no televisions or fruit machines, and a rear terrace looking over an eighteenth-century stone bridge. The kitchen does Whitby scampi, slow-cooked venison, braised pork with cider, crème fraîche and Dijon mustard, a shortcrust steak pie and Cumberland sausage with onion gravy; Paul is the bar manager, and the owners have been there twenty-four years. Down in Staithes, the harbour-side Cod & Lobster bakes cod on potato rösti and tops it with half a lobster and lobster bisque. The Ellerby Country Inn, with a bus stop outside on the Whitby–Middlesbrough route, leans to battered black pudding over wholegrain-mustard mash and moules marinière.

In Hinderwell, R Lyth has been a family butcher on the High Street since 1930, Richard as owner and James as manager, selling award-winning pork sausages and honey from beekeepers half a mile up the road.

Dales, Ridges and Horseback

The walking is the real draw. A five-and-a-half-mile circuit links Staithes, Port Mulgrave and Hinderwell with Borrowby Dale, joining the Cleveland Way and crossing steep wooded stream valleys and the fields Christopher Somerville described as "sheep pastures corrugated with medieval ridge-and-furrow." Borrowby Dale can be properly muddy. At the edge of the village, Borrowby Equestrian Centre runs escorted treks over the moor-and-coast country and lessons for children from four up.

The Quiet Return

The nearest trains are at Lealholm, about five miles away as the crow flies, on the Esk Valley line between Middlesbrough and Whitby, which is itself eight miles east. But most days in Borrowby it's quiet, and the view stops at the sea.