Ellerby

A village shaped by farms

A grassy beck runs open along the eastern verge of Ellerby. Around it the buildings still read as farms: wide verges, sandstone walls under red-clay pantiles, the odd stretch of drystone wall or mature hedge, with slate kept for Middle Farm and the old school. Ellerby grew out of four things — Middle Farm, Low Farm, the school that is now the Old School House, and the Ellerby Hotel.

The hotel, which also trades as the Ellerby Country Inn, is family-run, with a bar, a restaurant, a conservatory and ten bedrooms, and it sits about fifty yards off the A174 coast road. The older half is 18th-century stone under a Welsh-slate roof; the early-19th-century range beside it has pantiles and gabled dormers, so the join between the two is there if you look up.

Inn comforts and a coastal circuit

The kitchen serves pan-fried chicken with a choice of mango, Stilton or peppercorn sauce, battered cod with chips and peas, seabass on crushed new potatoes with lemon butter, and a halloumi and beetroot salad, with Sunday roasts too. Theakston Black Bull Bitter is the regular cask ale, with one changing guest beer and pale ales in summer. Dogs are welcome in the bar, conservatory, garden and the dog-friendly bedrooms, though not in the restaurant. The garden is secluded and long established, with tables for eating outside, and children get a menu of their own, cots, highchairs, games, colouring mats and a garden trail.

The walking starts a short way off. From Runswick Bay, a mile away, a nine-mile circuit follows the road towards Ellerby for about a quarter of a mile before turning onto the old Whitby–Redcar railway line, which carried trains from 1883 to 1958 and is now a disused trackbed underfoot. It crosses to Mickleby, follows Dale Beck and the Barnby hamlets to Lythe — Mulgrave Woods on one side, a distant sight of Whitby Abbey — then joins the Cleveland Way at Kettleness and returns along the cliff top and the beach. It takes about five hours, the stiles and waymarking are not always reliable, and current OS mapping is worth carrying.

Nearby shores, abbey and connections

Runswick Bay itself is a long sandy beach, good for a quiet couple of hours. Staithes sits three miles up the coast, and Whitby about eight, its abbey ruins overlooking the town on the headland where the Synod of Whitby met in 664. Whitby has the nearest station, step-free and run by Northern; the X4 and X4A buses between Middlesbrough and Whitby stop beside the inn, though it's worth checking times before you travel.

Domesday and surviving farm history

The 1086 Domesday entry places Ellerby in Langbaurgh hundred, on the land of Count Robert of Mortain. It records four ploughlands and six acres of meadow, no woodland and no people; the estate had been worth two pounds a year to its lord in 1066 and was now waste. Older fabric survives in the fields around it. Low Farmhouse carries the date 1628 and the initials I.P. cut into its door lintel, and keeps a through-passage plan, an external stone stair to a granary, and four pointed pigeon holes. A barn at Ellerby Grange still holds its half-octagonal horse gin.

Evening by the beck

In the evening the coast-road traffic thins, and the beck keeps running along the verge.