Commondale

Red Brick and the Village Inn

The houses at Commondale are orange-red brick, distinctive among the stone-built villages that surround it. The core of the village opens around a green, with mature trees and a war memorial, and moorland shows in the gaps between buildings. The valley here is narrow enough to see both sides at once. Coronation Cottages and Ness Terrace carry decorative brick and tile work.

The only pub is the Cleveland Inn, a quiet country inn about five hundred metres from the station. It keeps cask ale, with Wainwright Gold and Timothy Taylor Landlord as the regulars, and there is a garden, parking, games and the occasional bit of live music. Dogs are welcome. The pub is quiet, which in a village this size is less a boast than a description.

Rails, Tracks and Open Moor

Getting here without a car is possible but deliberate. Commondale has its own station on Northern's Esk Valley line between Middlesbrough and Whitby. It is unstaffed, and the platform is reached by crossing a farm paddock over uneven ground. Rail-replacement buses stop on the main road outside the village pub.

Walking is a major attraction here. A high-level circuit of five and a half miles climbs 620 feet and spends more than half its length above nine hundred, crossing open heather moor, following the old Quakers' Causeway, and passing tumuli and boundary stones before looking down into Esk Dale towards Whitby and the coast. One section is pathless and another is boggy, and a compass earns its place in the rucksack. Lower down, ancient pannier tracks run past the site of the former school and out onto the moor; smugglers used them as late as 1795 to carry contraband from the coast and store goods for distribution. Sleddale Beck rises from springs to the west and joins Commondale Beck, which in turn reaches the River Esk near Castleton, with Danby Low Moor to the north and Castleton Rigg to the south.

Fireclay, Pottery and Remembrance

The brick, and much of the village's character, came out of the ground. A bleach mill stood beside Commondale Beck from 1753, treating cloth woven in Danby, Westerdale and Commondale until 1850; during railway construction in 1861 the mill building briefly became a pub called the Diving Duck. In the 1860s John Pratt, a printer from Stokesley, recognised the local fireclay and founded the Cleveland Firebrick and Pottery Company. John Crossley took over the works in 1872, and from 1880 his son Alfred made art pottery in red and a silky buff terracotta: vases, biscuit jars, water bottles, teapots, candlesticks and busts of composers. The pottery phase was short, but brick, pipe, tile and terracotta continued until the works closed in 1947, and the last tall chimney was brought down in 1957. Caroline Riley, a resident and artist, has said it is now "hard to imagine the intense industrial activity" that once filled the valley.

St Peter's church, from 1897 and 1898, is built of the same red brick made next door, and its foundation stone remembers Admiral Thomas Chaloner. The Grade II war memorial, unveiled by Lord Gisborough in 1921 for ten local men, has salt-glazed inscription panels that were probably made at the village works too.

An Eskdale Change of Pace

For a change of pace, Danby Lodge National Park Centre lies a short way down the Esk, free to enter, and the Botton Village shop nearby sells estate-grown food and organic cheese from its own creamery. The village hall is the start for the Commondale Clart, a 5.2-mile fell race that begins just outside its door.

Commondale Clay Beyond the Village

Surviving Commondale pottery now sits behind glass in Whitby, Kirkleatham and York. In 2019 the village hall held a well-attended Brick Day, which tells you what a place built of its own clay chooses to celebrate.