Egton Bridge

Two inns by the Esk

To reach the Horseshoe Hotel on foot you cross the River Esk on a line of flat stepping stones set into the riverbed. There's no supervision at the crossing, so when the water is low it's a short hop across; when it is up, you take the road round instead. The pub sits in a horseshoe-shaped hollow with wooded slopes closing in on every side, and inside there are old settles and a large fire. Picnic tables stand on a raised grassy bank above the water. In summer an outdoor bar appears with a couple of extra handpumps. Wainwright Gold is the regular cask beer, with two changing regional ales alongside it, and dogs are welcome. The kitchen runs a curry night, fish on Fridays and Sunday roasts, and leans on local and seasonal ingredients. The building is Grade II listed.

The village's other pub, the Postgate, stands right beside the station, which is convenient in a way few country inns manage: you can arrive by train and be at the bar after a short walk. It dates from 1860, when it was the Station Hotel, and took its present name from Nicholas Postgate, the Catholic priest who was born here and hanged on York's Knavesmire in 1679. The menu changes with the day and the season and usually runs to fresh fish and local game. Past menus here have included Doreen's black pudding, Whitby hake in a prawn Mornay sauce, Bombay monkfish, locally smoked haddock chowder and prime beef Wellington. Mark is the landlord and does the cooking. There is a garden and a patio, two changing cask beers, and room for dogs.

St Hedda's and a recusant legacy

Above the pubs and the river sits St Hedda's, the Catholic church, built in 1866 and 1867 to a design by the Hadfields of Sheffield. The roof is the thing to look up at: a wooden barrel vault covered in stencilled decoration. Below it run five-bay arcades whose piers alternate between octagonal and circular, a carved octagonal pulpit, a circular stone font, painted murals in the apse and an elaborate German reredos. That there is a church of this scale at all is down to a long local persistence: Mass was said here quietly all through the years when Catholic worship was punished, first in a chapel at the Smiths' house at Bridgeholme Green, then in a chapel completed in 1798 that became the village school once St Hedda's opened.

Valley paths and Beggar's Bridge

The river valley is the reason to walk. The Esk Valley Walk runs 37 miles from the moorland source of the Esk down to Whitby, and its Lealholm-to-Grosmont stage passes straight through the village and over those same stepping stones. A shorter five-mile circuit links Egton Bridge with Glaisdale, along field paths, woodland tracks and old stone trods, with two proper climbs and views out over high farmland. At Glaisdale you come to Beggar's Bridge, a single arch inscribed with the initials TF and the date 1619, put up by Thomas Ferries, who according to local telling had once been unable to cross the flooded Esk to say goodbye to Agnes before going to sea, and came back rich enough to marry her and build the bridge.

Egton in Domesday

The Domesday commissioners valued Egton at a pound a year in 1066 and recorded it as waste twenty years later.

The gooseberry tradition

The village keeps one tradition above all others. The Old Gooseberry Society's earliest firm record is from 1825, when James Harrison won at the Royal Oak with a red berry called Sir John weighing seventeen pennyweights and twenty-one grains. The show moved between the local inns down the years, carried on through both wars, and stopped only in 2001, when foot-and-mouth closed it. The berries were once weighed in the Horseshoe's summerhouse and set out to be admired on St Thomas's Island, the small patch of ground just above the stepping stones you crossed to get your pint.