Egton

Witch marks above Esk Dale

The inglenook in the Witching Post Inn holds part of a St Andrew's cross, and it may be reused timber from a witch post: one of the oak or rowan uprights that Moors builders set beside a fireplace and carved with a cross to stop witches coming down the chimney. Whitby Museum keeps one taken from an Egton cottage. The inn is older than its beams let on. Historic England dates it to the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, when it went by Ye Horseshoe Inn. It is a free house now, with a real fire, two regular Theakston ales and a changing guest beer, and a beer garden behind. Walkers and their dogs are welcome. The food is steak and chips, and a homemade Sunday dinner with the trimmings.

You will have climbed to reach it. Egton stands high on a slope at the top of Egton Moor, north of Esk Dale, its buildings strung along a Y-shaped junction. The village is open and exposed and strongly linear, and the views arrive in gaps: look between the houses and you see across Esk Dale to the moors on the far side. Grey sandstone, pantile and slate roofs, low dry-stone walls and mature hedges make up the street, with an unusually high proportion of slate for the district, carried up by the railway. Barton's Row is a terrace of railway cottages.

Inns and ancient timber

The other pub is the Wheatsheaf, a nineteenth-century sandstone building, Grade II listed, with exposed beams, carved oak tables, open fires and several small rooms. Two of them are letting rooms. The kitchen cooks steak pie, fish pie, a curry of the day, Whitby wholetail scampi, and Sunday roasts of beef, lamb, pork or a nut roast, and pours Black Sheep among its ales. Gavin Bingham called it a "lovely cosy country pub, great atmosphere."

Cross View, near the top of the village, is older than either. It is cruck-framed, seventeenth century or earlier, with an eighteenth-century front, straw thatch, a rebuilt inglenook and a recess where a spice cupboard once sat. Egton no longer has a shop; the nearest is down in Grosmont.

Church stones and medieval roots

St Hilda's is comparatively new. It was built in 1878-79 to E. H. Smales's designs and paid for by the Foster family, in a Neo-Norman and Perpendicular style that looks back to the church it replaced. That older church stood about a kilometre west on Glaisdale Lane and was pulled down in 1878; its graveyard survives, with an 1897 mortuary chapel and the bases of three Norman pillars. In the south-west tower is a clock Abraham Foster gave in 1901 in memory of Queen Victoria, and a 1663 date stone was brought over from the old building.

Domesday recorded the place as Egetune, held under Nigel Fossard for Count Robert of Mortain. A market grant followed in the thirteenth century, and the village became a conservation area in 1993.

Down to Egton Bridge

A thirty-minute walk down into the valley, Egton Bridge has the station on the Esk Valley line between Middlesbrough and Whitby, along with stepping stones across the Esk and St Hedda's Catholic church, whose timber roof is patterned with gold stars. Whitby is six miles on, about fifteen minutes by car. Bus 96 links the two Egtons with Glaisdale, Grosmont, Lealholm, Sleights and Whitby, but only in daytime, Monday to Saturday, so a car may be useful.

When the showfield fills

The showfield fills for the Egton Horse and Agricultural Show, with its horses, and then the street goes quiet again above the dale.