Coxwold

The Village Street and Its Tables

The street through Coxwold is a broad, grass-banked slope of honey-coloured stone houses climbing to the church at the top. It sits inside the North York Moors National Park, east of the A19 between Easingwold and Thirsk.

The Fauconberg Arms holds the middle of it, a 17th-century inn with flagstone floors, beams and log fires, a bar, a snug and a restaurant. The ales are hand-pulled. The kitchen sends out Whitby breaded scampi and a steak-and-ale pie under the pub's own name, served with chips or new potatoes, garden peas and beef gravy; the lamb, beef, pork, game and eggs are Yorkshire-sourced, and some of the meat comes from Thornton's, whose owner lives in the village even though the shop itself is now in Easingwold. In summer the Old Cart Shed opens as an outdoor dining space for pre-booked groups, running to tapas, pizza and barbecue.

A few doors along, the Coxwold Tearooms are run by Keith and Pathitta, known as Jimmy, who moved here from Thailand in November 2024. Jimmy formerly ran a Thai cooking school, which shows up in the set-menu supper evenings alongside the daytime homemade cakes, scones, soup, bacon butties and jacket potatoes. The gift shop attached carries jewellery, cards, soft furnishings, vintage pieces and handmade Thai silk.

Village Pastimes and Country Paths

The Village Hall has public toilets beside it and, upstairs, the LOFT Cinema Club, which screens films twice a month. Behind it are two tarmac tennis courts, with junior holiday camps run by the coach Adam Scaife; access is for members and their guests rather than open to all.

Walking is the main reason to be out here. The Button Trail is a two-and-a-half-mile clue trail around the village itself, the option for families. High Leys is a similar distance, a road climb and a field descent with views to the Kilburn White Horse and the Pennines. Longer days head to Pond Head Reservoir through the land around Newburgh Priory, or over the ridge past Mount Snever's Vale of York viewpoint to Byland Abbey, once among the greatest monasteries in England and early-Gothic enough that its rose window is said to have inspired the one at York Minster. The route is not always well marked at gates and junctions near the top of the ridge, so take a map.

Arriving beneath St Michael's

Thirsk station is about 7.4 miles off in a straight line. The 31X runs Monday to Saturday, to Easingwold and York one way, Helmsley and Kirkbymoorside the other, and route 59 makes the trip to Thirsk on Mondays and Fridays. In summer the Moorsbus services M5 and M31 stop at the Village Hall on Sundays and public holidays.

The church of St Michael stands at the head of the street, fifteenth-century, with a three-storey octagonal tower carrying tiny flying buttresses and filigree tracery. Inside there is medieval glass, monuments to the Bellasis and Fauconberg families, a U-shaped Georgian altar rail, and box pews arranged to face the parson.

Laurence Sterne and Shandy Hall

The perpetual curate, from 1760 to 1768, was Laurence Sterne, who wrote Tristram Shandy while curate here and lived at Shandy Hall, a priest's hall house of about 1450 down the lane. His remains were brought back from London and reburied at the church; his original gravestone is kept in the porch. The almshouses nearby were founded in 1662 as a hospital for ten people and later divided into five homes, and the porch still carries the 1662 date and the Fauconberg arms. Under the older name of Cucvalt, the place was already on the Domesday roll.

At Shandy Hall one room was fitted out in 1767 for Eliza Draper. "I have this week finish'd a sweet little apartment," Sterne wrote to her that June. She never came to occupy it.