Above the fireplace in the main bar of the Duke of Wellington, a cast-iron plaque of the first Duke hangs where builders found it during a restoration. The inn overlooks the green, predates 1765, and has been the Red Briar and the Lord Wellington in its time; during the Napoleonic War it served as a recruiting post for local regiments. It still fields darts, dominoes and quoits teams. The food is traditional British cooking from mostly local suppliers, dogs are welcome in the main bar, and in fair weather you can sit out at the front.
Danby sits where the open moor gives way to the Esk Valley, its stone cottages and lanes running downhill toward the river. The station is in the village — unstaffed, step-free, no car park — on the line between Middlesbrough and Whitby, so you can reach either without a car. By road you come off the A171 at the turning west of Scaling Reservoir, or along the Esk Valley road. In summer the Moorsbus connects at the station for Danby Lodge, Guisborough via Castleton, and Pickering via Blakey Ridge.
A mile or so up at Ainthorpe, within the parish, the Fox & Hounds dates to 1555 and is reckoned the oldest pub in the area. Its kitchen is more ambitious than the setting suggests: Aji-spiced lamb skewers, beef-brisket croquettes, Thai soft-shell-crab salad, pan-fried market fish, a venison burger, porchetta, and for pudding sticky ginger parkin or rhubarb-and-custard cheesecake. There is fish and chips too. Dogs are allowed in the bar and lounge but not the main restaurant, and the bar keeps cask-conditioned regional ales.
For provisions there is the community-run Danby Health Shop, which sells organic food, supplements and eco household goods, and a village bakery. The better reason to keep driving is Botton, farther up Danby Dale, where the Camphill community runs a creamery, farm shop and café. They make four cheeses from their own Ayrshire and Dairy Shorthorn milk — Dale End Cheddar, Moorland Tomme, Botton Gouda and Summerfields Alpine — and two of them, Dale End and Summerfields, have taken gold at the World Cheese Awards. The cheesemonger Andy Swinscoe describes them as "made by hand, with raw milk, using traditional British breeds, on fabulously diverse pasture." The café bakes with what the farm produces, cheese scones included.
Walking is the point of staying here. Five circular routes of two to four miles start from Danby Lodge, the National Park centre beside the Esk; the booklet is at the desk. The two-mile Castle Walk takes field paths and quiet lanes to Danby Castle and returns over Duck Bridge — an hour, no stiles, though it crosses the railway line. From Danby Beacon, 299 metres up with views the whole way round, the Esk Valley Walk drops through Crunkly Ghyll to Lealholm, a village of riverside stepping stones. The beacon carried a Chain Home radar station from 1937; its operators helped guide Flight Lieutenant Peter Townsend to the first enemy aircraft brought down on English soil since the First World War, in February 1940.
Danby Castle is a late-fourteenth-century quadrangular ruin, part of it long since turned to farm buildings. Catherine Parr is said to have lived here before she married Henry VIII. Its Courtroom keeps a barrel-vaulted undercroft, seventeenth-century panelling and a judge's bench, and the Danby Court Leet still meets there to manage the common land. Duck Bridge, the humpbacked packhorse crossing on the castle walk, carries a Neville coat of arms on its north parapet; George Duck rebuilt it in 1717, its high arch built for the speed at which moorland rivers flood.
In the village itself, the Church of St Hilda keeps a fourteenth-century tower-porch, a nave rebuilt in 1789, Minton tiles in the chancel and a panelled west gallery. Boards on the walls name the parish benefactors and school subscribers of the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries.
Danby Lodge began as a shooting lodge and is now free to enter, with a café, a gallery and Danby Den, an accessible playground of zip wires, rope bridges and an electric ranger van. It is also a Dark Skies Station. On a clear night, once the café has closed and the children are worn out, that is the thing to stay up for.