Botton Village

Cheese from pasture to counter

At the head of Danby Dale, Botton Creamery matures four raw-milk cheeses: Dale End Cheddar, Moorland Tomme, Summerfields and Botton Gouda. The herd is Ayrshire and Dairy Shorthorn, the pasture is organic, and Dale End and Summerfields have both taken golds at the World Cheese Awards. Ruth Wells, the Creamery Manager, traces the interest back to watching her mother make cheese in a farmhouse kitchen in East Yorkshire. The cheesemonger Andy Swinscoe describes the results as "made by hand, with raw milk, using traditional British breeds, on fabulously diverse pasture."

You can buy that cheese, and much else, at the Botton Village Shop, which combines a farm shop, a grocery and a gift shop under one roof, with free parking outside. The shelves carry Botton-reared meat, the village's own fruit and vegetables, and crafts made in the community's own workshops: rugs, pottery, cards, printed things from the Print Press. There are refill stations for pulses, pasta, coffee beans and household cleaners. It is a proper village shop.

A café among eight neighbourhoods

A short walk away is the café, which is dog-friendly. The sandwiches and toasties are built around Botton cheese, with pickle or onion; there is quiche with salad and beans, fruit scones with jam and cream, cheese scones with chutney, homemade cakes and Botton milkshakes. The coffee is Dancing Goat. One recent visitor called it "a little off the beaten track but well worth seeking out."

Botton is not a single street but eight neighbourhoods that the National Park maps across roughly 600 acres, linked by roads, old farm tracks and footpaths, with cast-iron fingerposts to help you find your way between them. Sandstone-and-pantile farmsteads share the dale with timber-clad buildings in the Steiner manner: irregular, sculptural, their large windows turned towards the valley. The community chapel, built in the early-to-mid 1990s, is one of these, with rough-sawn timber over a stone base, sinuous internal walls and chamfered windows that draw the light towards the altar.

From Quakers to Camphill

The village belongs to the Camphill movement. It was founded in 1955 as the first Camphill centre offering supported living to adults with learning disabilities, and the first thirty residents arrived to a dale with no mains electricity, water or sewage; the power came in 1958. Before that it had been a sporting estate: George Macmillan's sporting lodge, Botton Hall, was designed by W. J. Moscrop, with building beginning in May 1899. In 1656 the Quakers John and Euphemia Hartas had bought Thatch House and set about draining the marsh and walling the fields; George Fox stopped here on his travels.

Where Jenga began

In the early 1980s the woodworking shop was asked to make the first hundred sets of a new game by its inventor, Leslie Scott. They were sold at Harrods. The game was Jenga.

Walking in from Danby Rigg

For walkers, the eight-mile circuit from Ainthorpe climbs Danby Rigg to a 1,022-foot trig point and drops into the dale along the Jack Sledge Road before crossing Botton itself. The nearest station is Danby, unstaffed but step-free, on the Esk Valley line between Middlesbrough and Whitby; by car you leave the A171 at Danby School and follow the lane about two miles into the village itself.