Easington

Village Food and Hospitality

The Tiger Inn sits on Whitby Road, the stretch of the A174 that runs straight through Easington: a stone pub and inn with a separate bar, a dining room, a patio and gardens that carry on past a children's play area. It is the only pub in the village, which puts some weight on a single kitchen. There is a steak-and-ale pie with hand-cut chips, a roast-beef Sunday lunch with Yorkshire pudding, stuffing and cauliflower cheese, fish pie, gammon with a fried egg and homemade chips, and a beef madras alongside the farmhouse breakfast. One recent visitor recorded having "never had so much steak in a pie and the hand cut chips were absolute top class." Five cask beers change rather than settle in; Camerons Best Bitter and Ossett White Rat have both been on lately. Dogs are welcome, and if you bring one to stay the night it costs nothing extra.

A short way along the same road, Dales Farm — the Farm Direct country store — stocks fruit and vegetables, potatoes, free-range eggs, meat from Glaves Butchers, bread, milk, and Farm Direct's own jams and chutneys, along with home-grown bedding plants, animal feed and gardening supplies. Its café does homemade breakfasts, hot meals, sandwiches, panini, jacket potatoes, quiche, pies and fresh scones.

Stone, Glass and Saxon Roots

The old village gathers at the junction with Grinkle Lane, where the church tower and a stand of mature trees mark the historic core from a distance. All Saints is younger than it looks. The present sandstone church was built in 1888–89 to a design by Charles Hodgson Fowler, paid for by Alfred Lambert and his rector son in memory of Augusta Mary Palmer; Mrs Lambert laid the foundation stone with an oak mallet made from the door of the church it replaced. Inside are a hammerbeam nave roof, Walter E. Tower's stained glass of 1907–08, a 13th-century grave cover inscribed in Norman French to Robert Bucell, and Lady Chapel furniture by Robert "Mousey" Thompson, carved mouse and all. High in the tower sits a reconstructed 12th-century chancel arch, kept from an earlier building on the site. The tower carries a quarter-striking clock and an eight-bell carillon.

There has been a church here since Saxon times, and Henry II granted it to Guisborough Priory in 1182. When the Domesday commissioners reached the area in 1086, the entry for Easington was combined with twelve other places nearby; between them it counted one villager and one plough team.

Manor Earthworks and the Coast Beyond

Beside Easington Hall Farm the ground still holds the plan of a medieval manor: a moated platform of around 1250 to 1350, an engineered pond, building platforms, hollow ways and two circular mounds read as dovecotes. Historic England calls the earthworks a rare undamaged survival for this part of England, in what now reads as an ordinary field.

Easington sits about a mile inland, and rising ground keeps the sea out of sight even though the coast is close. The land around is mostly arable, climbing north toward Boulby Head, with the wooded Easington Beck valley cut in half a mile to the east. Walkers can drop into that valley on the long circuit from Loftus, which follows Easington Beck down to Staithes and returns along four kilometres of Cleveland Way clifftop — 11.5 miles in all. A gentler option is the mile of clifftop between Staithes and Port Mulgrave, above the ruins of the old ironstone harbour. Staithes itself repays the short trip: cobbled lanes, a car-free old village below a steep bank, and Dog Loup, an alley 45 centimetres wide.

The A174 and Rail Connections

The A174 links the village west to Loftus, a mile off, and on to Saltburn, where the nearest station runs trains toward Middlesbrough and Darlington. Arriva's service 5 starts at Ryelands Park in the village and heads through Loftus and Guisborough to Middlesbrough.

A Last Detail in Stone

By the road in the old core, a stone drinking fountain and trough still stand.