Alum Beck runs down the length of Carlton-in-Cleveland, and small stone bridges cross it at intervals, joining the two halves of what is really one long street. The houses are stone with pantile roofs, sash windows and low front walls, set under mature trees that soften the long rooflines. St Botolph's stands on a raised site at the northern end, with Manor House and Manor Cottages close by. The village lies off the main roads, below Carlton Bank and the open Cleveland Hills, and it is a quiet place to arrive.
The pub is the Blackwell Ox Inn, about 800 yards east of the A172, with log fires and a garden. It cooks two menus at once. Alongside steak-and-ale pie, battered local cod, gammon steak, vegetarian lasagne and salmon in a white-wine, saffron and prawn sauce, the kitchen turns out Thai red and green curries, pad kee mow, cashew stir-fry, crispy duck with leek, satay chicken and Thai fishcakes. One visitor singled out the salt-and-pepper ribs, the duck red curry and a vegetable yellow curry. Four cask beers change on rotation, and the pub has reached the Good Beer Guide many times. There is a large children's play area outside.
There is no shop or post office any more; for groceries you drive to Stokesley or Great Ayton, both market towns of the useful, independent-shop kind. Stokesley's church has Mouseman woodwork; Great Ayton was Captain Cook's boyhood home and keeps a small museum in his old school.
St Botolph's is not old, though the site is. The present church is late-19th-century work by Temple Moore, completed in 1897, built of local sandstone in a Gothic, Arts-and-Crafts manner. The large east window and two First World War memorial windows are the work of the Birmingham artist Henry Payne, and eight bells were hung in 1908. In the churchyard stands a weathered early-medieval cross, half a metre of gritstone shaft with faint interlace still legible; local tradition ties it to a visit by St Botolph in 675.
The church that stood here before burned down in October 1881. The vicar, George Sanger, was arrested on suspicion of setting the fire, and the case collapsed for lack of evidence. His written protest survives in the county archives, complaining that the prosecution rested on "village gossip, vulgar spite and police credulity". The building was eventually completed under his successor, Canon John Kyle.
Above the village the walking is the real reason to come. From Lord Stones Country Park at the top of Carlton Bank, a 2.75-mile circuit contours Cringle Moor on maintained paths, with long views over the Cleveland plain to Roseberry Topping and Captain Cook's Monument, and a stiff stepped climb near the end. The Cleveland Way crosses the tops here on its Osmotherley-to-Clay Bank stage, an eleven-mile traverse past the Wainstones, the ground still marked by old alum, jet and ironstone workings. Carlton Bank Alum Works was established around 1680 and laid idle in 1774 because alum prices were too low.
The nearest station is Battersby, about five and a half miles off, unstaffed, on the Esk Valley line. Hodgsons Coaches run the local bus, which threads Carlton together with Stokesley, Swainby, Osmotherley and Northallerton. Otherwise the approach is by road from Stokesley, past the beck and the bridges, to a street where the loudest thing on most days is the water.