A stone post on the High Street marks where the cheese wagons once lined up. Castleton was Upper Eskdale's market and industrial centre, with annual wool, cheese and cattle fairs and a cheese market of its own; the local cheese-making tailed off after 1946, and the post, now also serving as a sundial, is what is left of it. The village sits at the end of Castleton Rigg, on a ridge above Danby Dale and Esk Dale, with moor rising north of the river and the tree-lined Danby Beck winding below to the east.
Coming in from the north, the road drops from Three Howes Rigg, passes under the railway and crosses the Esk, with the cricket field on the valley floor below and the village on the ridge ahead. Castleton Moor station sits in that lower northern quarter, on Northern's Esk Valley line between Middlesbrough and Whitby, which makes the walk to Lealholm possible without a car.
There are two pubs. The Eskdale stands on the bank of the river; its owners, Kirsty and Marcus, say they first stopped here for a drink on the way to their second date. The kitchen leans toward local produce, with a restaurant-led menu: twice-baked Dale End cheddar and chive soufflé, wild-garlic and ricotta gnocchi, beer-battered haddock with triple-cooked chips, curry sauce and minted peas, a "dirty" burger built on salt-beef brisket, smoked cheddar and bacon jam, Moroccan-spiced venison loin, and treacle tart with orange-marmalade ice cream. A garden runs down toward the water, and there is a raised deck off the small room they call Restaurant 1865. Dogs are welcome.
The Downe Arms Inn is a traditional country inn with a cosy bar: homemade steak-and-ale pie, fish and chips, sticky-toffee pudding, a Sunday roast that comes with shared bowls of vegetables, and a Steak Night. It is run by Johnathon and Ashley, whose young son Mason is described as the real landlord. Dogs get water bowls and treats in the bar.
For provisions there is a Co-op, and on Church Street a refill shop and bakery called Off the Scale, which does savoury bakes, flapjacks, brownies and traybakes. The Old Chapel Tearoom is on the High Street.
The walking is the reason many people come. The Esk Valley Walk, thirty-seven miles and waymarked with a leaping salmon, begins here, climbs Danby Dale to the river's moorland source and on through Westerdale, then follows the valley down through Danby, Lealholm, Glaisdale, Egton Bridge and Grosmont to Whitby. For a shorter day, the linear route to Lealholm is 7.3 miles over woodland and field paths, with a couple of minor-road stretches, open moor and a steep pull up to Danby Beacon along a defined track before it drops toward the Esk; stations at both ends mean you can walk one way and take the train back.
The church is younger than it looks. St Michael and St George was built in 1924 to a mid-fourteenth-century design, in rock-faced brown sandstone, as a First World War memorial. Its benches, organ screen and altar panelling carry Robert Thompson's carved mouse. It replaced an iron chapel of ease that Viscountess Downe had funded in 1865.
The castle that named the place is gone. Robert de Brus received the Forest and Lordship of Danby after about 1089 and probably raised an initial timber castle on the mound above the village; it was later rebuilt in stone and then abandoned for Danby Castle in the fourteenth century. Domesday Book, compiled in 1086, has no entry for Castleton, consistent with a place named after a castle raised only after about 1089. Down at Howe Mill, a water-powered corn mill was recorded in 1272, joined to the village by stone trods across the beck.
The oddest thing to have left Castleton is a hand. A stonemason and local historian, Joseph Ford, found a mummified human one hidden in a cottage wall in the early twentieth century and identified it as a Hand of Glory, a felon's hand that folklore said would keep a household asleep while burglars worked. He gave it to Whitby Museum in 1935, where it remains the only alleged example anyone has found.
On the gable of a former inn, blocked windows and a faded painted sign still read Robin Hood and Little John. The building is houses now, and the story that the two men met here for the last time is only a story, but the 1671 lintel over the door is real.