Church Houses

The inn and its walker welcome

The bar at the Feversham Arms Inn is floored in Yorkshire stone flags, with a snug to one side and open fires through the winter. It is the pub in Church Houses. Rachel Forster manages the inn, which keeps two dining rooms, three en-suite rooms and a large garden looking down the length of Farndale. Walkers bring their dogs into the bar; there is nothing precious about it.

The food is traditional and sourced locally where the kitchen can manage it, with vegan, vegetarian and gluten-free choices and packed lunches to order. Past menus have included a Farndale venison burger, battered cod with chips and mushy peas, and smoked-haddock-and-mozzarella fishcakes. Two or three changing beers come through, often from Black Sheep, Timothy Taylor's, Daleside or Helmsley. CAMRA's York branch named it their Summer Country Pub of the Season in 2023. The Coast to Coast crosses close by at Blakey Ridge, and with notice the inn will collect walkers off the route and run them back.

Into Farndale and the spring meadows

Church Houses is the upper of Farndale's two small hamlets. The River Dove works through pasture and woodland below, with moorland rising wild on both sides. Getting here means narrow lanes over the moor, signed from the A170 towards Castleton; there is no bus into the dale, and the nearest station is Castleton Moor, some eleven kilometres away as the crow flies, on the Esk Valley line between Middlesbrough and Whitby.

In spring the riverside meadows fill with native wild daffodils, Narcissus pseudonarcissus, smaller than the garden kind, which the Farndale Local Nature Reserve was created to protect in 1955. The story that Rievaulx monks planted them is tradition rather than established fact. Either way the lanes fill with cars for those few weeks.

The river walk and Low Mill provisions

The Daffodil Walk is why many people come: three and a half miles from Low Mill up to Church Houses and back beside the Dove, about two hours. The riverside route has gates but no stiles, just a couple of short inclines and the usual chance of mud; the higher path back across the fields has occasional stiles instead. A. J. Brown, writing in 1952, said "the little River Dove seems to dance down the dale." Halfway along, the Daffy Caffy at High Mill sells refreshments. For a longer day, the walk into Bransdale runs nine and a half miles over Rudland Rigg and back, roughly six hours.

There is no shop in Church Houses itself; the nearest is Farndale Store down at Low Mill, selling Farndale-reared beef and pork, homemade ready meals, deli sausage rolls, chocolate brownies, Roost of Malton coffee and local gin, wine and cider alongside eggs, milk and cereal.

Stone, machinery and the lake that never was

St Mary's Church was built in 1831 and extended between 1907 and 1914 by Temple Moore, who added the baptistry. It is sandstone under a slate roof, with a king-post roof over the nave and a barrel-vaulted ceiling to the chancel, and its churchyard is left long for wildlife. Nearby, High Mill keeps three floors of wooden shafting and a top-floor hurst drive that Historic England calls reputedly unique.

The village came close to going under water. In 1932 Hull Corporation bought around 2,000 hectares of Upper Farndale for a reservoir, with the dam to stand at Church Houses: 1,900 feet long, 130 feet high, holding back a lake two and a half miles long. War delayed it, the scheme was revived in 1970, and a parliamentary committee rejected it after a petition of some 10,000 names.

A dale community at work

The village hall was rebuilt in 2019 and runs a film club, a walking group and yoga among other things. On 31 August 2026, a field at Church Houses fills with sheepdog trials, terrier racing, a beagle parade and vintage steam engines for the Farndale Show.