Thornton Beck runs right beside the lane at Ellerburn, past limestone houses roofed in red handmade pantiles and a church under grey stone slate. There are two houses, a farm and St Hilda's, and then the valley slopes gently away to the north of Thornton-le-Dale. The National Park's own design code calls it a "small, quiet hamlet."
Just beyond the church, in her own home at Cosy Nook, Caroline Winskill runs the Tea Cosy Tea Room. The kitchen turns out homemade cakes, gluten-free ones among them, savoury scones, hot sandwiches, soups sometimes made with produce from the garden, and local ice creams. There is a garden to sit in and a few parking spaces. "There's a real sense of community in my kitchen," Winskill says.
It is the only business in the hamlet itself. For a pub you walk the mile into Thornton-le-Dale, where the Buck Inn does home-cooked food and pies, keeps Yorkshire cask ales, and welcomes dogs in the bar and lounge; head chef Mike runs the kitchen, and there is a large garden and patio for warmer days. The same village has traditional shops and the Chocolate Factory in The Forge on The Square, where the handmade chocolates run from bars to novelty figures.
St Hilda's is the reason most people find the lane at all. The nave and chancel are eleventh-century; the buttresses came with a fifteenth-century restoration, and the porch and bellcote were added in 1904 when Caröe and Passmore reworked the building. Inside there is an eleventh-century altar stone, a circular font of the eleventh or twelfth century, an eighteenth-century octagonal pulpit and restored poppyhead pews. Pieces of pre-Conquest sculpture are set into the walls and the porch, older than nearly everything around them.
The church has also had to share itself with its bats. It held an important breeding group of Natterer's bats and at least three other species, whose droppings and urine had overwhelmed the small congregation. In 2013 Natural England licensed work to keep the bats in the roof while shutting them out of the worship space below.
Across the beck the old industry survives mostly in the place names. Low Farm was once the Old Bleach Mill; Low Paper Mill and High Paper Mill record paper-making, quarrying and the bleaching of cloth and yarn. Low Paper Mill became a commercial fish farm around the turn of the twentieth century. Old Ellers, the former vicarage, dates from the late seventeenth century and is believed to be one of the earliest vicarages to survive in a relatively complete state, with a two-cell plan and exposed beams on the ground floor. When the Domesday surveyors reached this corner of Yorkshire under King William, much of it was recorded as waste.
The walking starts at the door. A level, waymarked two-mile circular links Ellerburn and Thornton-le-Dale along riverside fields, out to St Hilda's and back by the minor road, with gates, the odd stile and mud after rain. A shorter beckside loop passes Victoria Mill; a longer one carries on past the trout farm into Dalby Forest, two to three hours with a bird hide on the way back through Sand Dale. The lane itself is a dead end, reached through Thornton-le-Dale off the A170, with the nearest trains at Malton about nine miles away.
Do the two-mile round and it brings you back past the church and the tea-room garden, where the beck keeps running whether anyone is there to hear it or not.