Chop Gate

The Inn and the Open Moor

The Buck Inn stands on the B1257 where it runs the length of the dale, a six-room inn with a bistro and bar run by Helen and Wolfgang. Much of what reaches the kitchen is grown here or sourced within twenty miles, and the seasonal menu tends to live on the blackboard rather than in print. The beer is more settled: Timothy Taylor's cask ales on handpull, German keg beer brought over from Germany, and Guinness. The pub has appeared in CAMRA's Good Beer Guide for seven years running and belongs to Timothy Taylor's Champion Club. It sits two and a half miles from Clay Bank and calls itself the closest inn to Wainwright's Coast to Coast; guests staying over can arrange a lift up to Clay Bank in the morning.

Most people who come to Chop Gate come to walk. The village sits where the eastern road down the dale and Raisdale Road from the west meet below Cold Moor, and it works as Bilsdale's small service point rather than somewhere to browse. The village hall car park, south of the houses, has toilets and is the practical start for a long list of routes — the parish keeps a collection of twenty-three of them, all beginning here. The best-known is the Wainstones circuit, about eight miles over Cold Moor before joining the Cleveland Way through the Wainstones themselves and back across Urra Moor. The Cleveland Way stretch is stone-surfaced and waymarked; Urra Moor, further round, can be boggy. A gentler loop runs over Cold Moor and Cringle Moor to Lordstones, then back by Brian's Pond and Raisdale Mill.

Lordstones on Carlton Bank

Lordstones sits up on Carlton Bank, on the Cleveland Way above the dale, and keeps a Chop Gate postal address although it is well outside the village. Its café does home-made cakes and Belted Galloway beef — a Bilsdale Beltie steak-and-ale pie, a Beltie burger, dry-cured gammon with a duck egg, fishcakes, a sausage sandwich. There is a sun terrace, though dogs are not allowed inside the main building. The beef comes off the Urra Estate, grass-fed and hung for at least three weeks, and can be bought by the box from the shop. For meat delivered to the door, Bilsdale Dexters run refrigerated vans around the dale.

A Dale Written in Stone

The landscape here is dry-stone-walled fields, sandstone farmhouses under clay-pantile roofs, the River Seph working south along the valley floor, and the Bilsdale television mast standing over the western skyline. The parish church, St Hilda's, is not in the village but a little north at Seave Green: a rock-faced sandstone building of 1851 by Banks and Barry, with fish-scale bands in the roof and a double bellcote beneath a short spire. Its tenor bell, kept from an earlier church on the site, is inscribed "Ave Maria Mater" and carries the mark of Walter of Easingwold, a York potter given freedom to trade in 1327.

Finding Chop Gate

The name is spoken "Chop Yat", which catches out most first-time visitors. Stokesley, the nearest market town, is seven miles north; Helmsley is seventeen south; Rievaulx Abbey is about twenty minutes' drive, its ruins spread along the Rye. The nearest railway is at Battersby, a few miles off, with a road transfer at the end of it. In the warmer months the Moorsbus M4 stops at the Buck Inn on weekends and holidays, linking all of these places along the dale.

When Bilsdale Gathers

Once a year Thornhill Farm holds the Bilsdale show, with classes for horses and ponies, sheep and lambs, produce, children and dogs, a fell race and a line of vintage tractors and engines — the sort of day that brings the whole dale down off the moor.