The village hall is a shed of grey-and-green corrugated iron, and it began as a hospital. During the war it was a ward building in Thirsk; in 1949 it was taken down, carried up onto the moors and rebuilt here as the Cold Kirby Institute. It was restored in 2008, modernised in 2010, and now holds a community library and a room the village can book. It stands beside the Cleveland Way, opposite the church.
The church is the other fixed point, and it is empty. The present stone building went up in 1841 on the site of one with 12th-century origins; it closed in 2024, and the Church of England is now trying to sell it. Inside, the font survived from the medieval church, and there are two bells, one from the 13th century and the other cast in 1665 and inscribed "God savee his church." The parish was first held by the Knights Templar and, after their suppression, by the Knights Hospitallers, who kept it until the Reformation. St Michael's is not itself listed, which is odd in a village with five listed buildings, all of them domestic or agricultural.
Cold Kirby is a dispersed, linear place that forks into a Y at its eastern end. Large greens, broad grass verges, mature trees and deep front gardens give it a leafy, open feel. The houses are long and narrow, built of sandstone with red pantile roofs and Yorkshire sliding sash windows, set back behind dry-stone walls and picket gates.
What it does not have is a pub or a shop. This is a place to stay for the walking and the quiet, and to drive out for everything else.
The Cleveland Way runs straight through, on its ten-mile section between Helmsley and Sutton Bank. Coming up from Rievaulx Abbey it passes the woods and ponds of Nettledale, climbs gradually to the village, then carries on past the old Hambleton racecourse to the Sutton Bank escarpment. A nine-mile circular links Cold Kirby with Rievaulx and Old Byland across wooded valleys, passing the 13th-century Rievaulx Bridge, and the longer St Aelred's Pilgrim Trail threads the church here on to Hawnby, Scawton, Helmsley and Rievaulx.
Sutton Bank itself is a couple of miles south-west, where the ground drops away over the Vales of York and Mowbray. James Herriot called the view "finest in England." The National Park Centre up there has a café and a free play area with treehouses, a stone castle, a sandpit and a mud kitchen.
For dinner, the Carpenters Arms at Felixkirk is a short drive: Yorkshire venison carpaccio, beer-battered Hodgsons of Hartlepool haddock with triple-cooked chips, roasted lamb rump, using seasonal produce from its Mount St John kitchen garden a few miles off. Dogs are allowed in the bar and a dining area. Helmsley, five and a half miles east, has the shops, the cafés and a castle.
During the 17th and 18th centuries Hambleton Down was one of the country's leading racecourses, the Newmarket of the North; Queen Anne and George I both gave gold cups, and the village filled with jockeys and stable hands. The historic racecourse has gone, but training stables remain on the down. The Domesday surveyors reckoned the place at a household and a half.