Behind the New Inn there is a brewery, purpose-built in 1994, and the pub in front of it is where you drink what it makes. Cropton Brewery began in 1984 and came back into Lee family hands in 2023; the New Inn is its tap, with Cropton Yorkshire Pale and Cropton Yorkshire Classic on regularly alongside changing beers from the Great Yorkshire range. There are brewery tours, and a beer festival every November. The kitchen serves a Cropton Stout Pie made with the brewery's own stout and a New Inn Sausage Ring built to a house recipe, in the bars, a conservatory and a restaurant. Dogs are welcome, there is a garden, and you can stay or camp on site.
The New Inn stands near the village's main street, which is unusually broad. The houses are rubble limestone with quoins, pantile roofs and stone or brick chimneys, and just north of the junction the view opens out towards Cropton Forest. The National Park describes the place as "quietly tucked away on the edge of the Tabular Hills and Cropton Forest."
St Gregory's stands beyond the village to the northwest. It was rebuilt in 1844 after a fire, by the Atkinsons of York, in squared limestone with a west bellcote, a five-bay nave and an apsidal chancel. The font survived and is 12th-century, carved with nailhead moulding. Inside, a wall tablet remembers Captain George Lee, who died in 1794.
Next to the church is Cropton Hall Garth, the earthworks of a Norman motte-and-bailey castle. The motte still rises six and a half metres. It is attributed to Robert de Stuteville, known as Frontdebos, who probably built it after William Rufus granted him the manor; a later manor house went up on the site in 1290-95 for John, Lord Wake. It sits on a plateau above the steep drop of Hallgarth Hill, looking out over Rosedale. Domesday recorded Cropton as a royal manor with no inhabitants listed at all.
The village also produced William Scoresby, born here in 1789, who went to sea as an Arctic whaler, turned Arctic scientist and then clergyman, and wrote more than a hundred works on oceanography and magnetism. His father had already devised an improved crow's nest and ice drill for the whaling ships.
The walking starts at the door. A footpath between the New Inn and Corner Cottage runs down to Grunsty Stile and on to Cropton Mill, once a corn mill, and quieter streamside paths lead through wooded ravines towards Sinnington. Cropton Forest, just north, has a set of waymarked trails — the Forest Ramble, Little Beck Walk, Paradise Walk, Spiers Bank Walk and an Easy Access Trail across a wildflower meadow — and the High Muffles cycle loop, a short family ride that returns on a steady descent. At Cawthorn, three Roman military earthworks sit along an easy-going, self-guided mile-long trail with no steps or stiles; the first section is firm enough underfoot for a robust buggy. The forest also holds a family of beavers in an enclosed trial.
Pickering, with its castle, its steam railway and Beck Isle Museum, is about 7 km away, reached via the A170; the nearest mainline trains are at Malton. On Mondays the 173 bus links Cropton to Pickering and Rosedale, stopping at Home Farm and Croft House Farm, though not on bank holidays.
Cropton has changed within living memory. Traces of the old work remain just beyond the pub, where quarries and limekilns supplied the stone the houses are built from. Electricity arrived in 1949, mains water only in the early 1960s. Until the mid-1980s, when the doctor was expected, Mrs Gill would tie a red scarf around the signpost beneath the chestnut tree, and anyone who needed him watched for it.