St Aidan's stands at the edge of Carlton with a square west tower, three bells, a pyramidal roof and windows so small you could walk past the building without registering how carefully it was made. Temple Moore designed it — probably in 1884, with the building following in 1885–87 — when he was about twenty-eight, and kept the lancets narrow on purpose, so that what light there is concentrates on the altar. The south doorway is subtly asymmetric, worked with ornate ironwork and a figure of Christ; a stone Celtic cross sits on the east gable. Pevsner wrote that the church "affords a sense of physical and spiritual shelter."
You can stay in it. The nave is now the sitting and dining room, the bedroom sits behind the painted chancel screen, and a garden-room extension added in 2011 opens onto a patio looking out over farmland. Inside, the Arts-and-Crafts furnishings keep their original colour schemes, and there was never any provision for preaching. One guest described the place as "awe-inspiring and cosy at the same time."
The rest of Carlton is a single limestone street on high, open ground. Houses of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century limestone rubble sit behind narrow grass verges and stone walls, with gaps between them that keep the views open on both sides. The old smithy survives in the centre, derelict. There is a timber-clad village hall. The lanes and drovers' tracks around the village are medieval.
For a pub or a shop, Helmsley is the nearest option: the National Park's only market town, two miles south, where most of your practical needs are met. The Black Swan on the Market Place is a former coaching inn dating to the fifteenth century, with Elizabethan, Tudor and Georgian sections, serving fish and chips, steak and ale pie, and Sunday roasts with hand-carved meat and homemade Yorkshire puddings; it has a walled garden and takes dogs in designated areas. For beer, the Helmsley Brewing Co brew tap on Bridge Street pours its own, including a 4% pale called Striding, the official beer of the Cleveland Way, which sends a donation to the trail for every bottle sold.
Hunters of Helmsley makes deep-filled sandwiches to order and sells home-cooked cold meats, pies and Yorkshire cheeses. Auntie Anne's Castlegate Bakery, run by Susan and her mother Anne, bakes steak pies, Yorkshire curd tarts and parkin on the premises. Helmsley also has a Friday market, a castle, a walled garden, a seasonal open-air pool and, at Duncombe Park, the National Centre for Birds of Prey.
Carlton sits on one of the better walks in the area. The Helmsley circular runs about eight and a quarter miles through Ash Dale, up Keld Lane into the hamlet, past Carlton Grange, then back through Collier Hag Wood and Beck Dale beside Borough Beck. From Helmsley you can also pick up the Cleveland Way and reach Rievaulx Abbey, founded in 1132, in three miles on foot.
Plan on driving the last stretch: Helmsley is on the A170, and the nearest useful railhead is Malton, seventeen miles from Helmsley. Buses run to Helmsley; for the final two miles into the hamlet, check the connection yourself.
In the evening the small windows earn themselves. The light narrows to the altar end, the street goes quiet, and the church that was built to shelter people is doing it again, for two at a time.