Broxa

A Limestone Village on the Plateau

A red telephone box stands at the front of Broxa, a Grade II-listed K6 set before what is thought to be a former water tower. Broxa is a single line of houses on a high limestone plateau, each set back behind its garden with outbuildings ranged behind and fields or paddocks in the gaps. There is space between the buildings and very little modern infill, so the place keeps what the National Park calls a "peaceful agricultural character."

The building materials are consistent: limestone and slate, roofs of red clay pantile, chimneys of brick or stone, dry-stone walls, native hedges and five-bar gates. The oldest cottages are terraces of one and a half storeys. From up here the ground falls away into wooded dales, and the views run a long way.

Forest Trails and Country Inns

There is no pub in Broxa today, no shop and no church, so a stay here is organised around the forest to the north and the country inns a few miles out. Broxa Forest covers 730 hectares of mixed conifer and broadleaf, threaded with heath-like clearings and some unusual trees. In summer nightjars arrive from Africa and churr after dusk.

The walking starts at Reasty Hill Top, where the forest car park sits at the head of Forest Drive. The Broxa Forest Walk is a circular of about five and three-quarter miles that runs out to the escarpment edge above Harwood Dale before turning back through mixed woodland; it takes roughly two and a half hours and has no stiles, though the tracks turn muddy in the wet. A longer eight-mile circular takes in Ward Hill, Lownorth Bridge, the River Derwent, Low Dale and Whisper Dale. The Blue Man Walk runs sixteen miles from the same start, linking Broxa, Langdale and Dalby forests. Away from these named routes, the local trails are not waymarked, so a map is worth carrying. The Moor to Sea Cycle Network passes through the forest on its way across the moors.

Food Beyond Broxa and Ancient Ground

For food and a fire, the choices are a few miles out. At Burniston, the Oak Wheel Inn is run by Shaun and Kate Hull, with Shaun in the kitchen; the menu names a signature steak, ale and mushroom pie in hot-water pastry, a Glaves of Brompton sausage wheel with champ and red-wine onion gravy, and beer-battered haddock, with Timothy Taylor Landlord on cask. At Cloughton Newlands, the Bryherstones Country Inn is Paul and Sally Shipley's, and it lists Sally's Famous Steak Pie, Whitby battered scampi, and haddock with proper chips and homemade tartare sauce; there is a large rear garden with a small play area. The Grainary, a restaurant on a working farm at Harwood Dale, has views back across the moors.

Farmers cleared this high ground in the early Bronze Age, and it later held an Iron Age settlement. On the ridge between Hard Dale Gill and the Derwent valley, a Bronze Age round barrow was opened up in 1949, its mound covering a central cremation buried with Beaker pottery, flint tools and a jet button, and seven further cremations around it. By the 12th century the land between Pickering, Scarborough and Whitby had become royal hunting forest.

Getting Here and Hackness Church

Scarborough is the nearest mainline station and the forest lies within ten kilometres of it; drivers come off the A171 at Burniston and follow the signs. No regular bus reaches the village, only a permit-only school service. At Hackness, the Grade I church of St Peter keeps two carved fragments of a probably ninth-century Anglo-Saxon cross, worked with interlace and a pair of griffins, along with eight probably fifteenth-century misericords and a canopied font cover.

Nightjar Evenings

In the evenings the churring starts again in the trees, and there is not much else to hear.