The Sutton Arms keeps a real fire and is the only pub in the village. Diners come for the steaks — one recent visitor described 12oz and 16oz cuts served with homemade chips, onion rings and Diane sauce — and Sunday lunch is a regular favourite. Recent favourites also include chicken Parmesan, surf and turf and sticky toffee pudding, with a children's menu and outside seating also listed. There is cask ale and two changing beers, neither with a settled name. One May 2025 visitor left it at "It's a little gem. The staff were so friendly & helpful, & the food was amazing." The bus stop stands about twenty metres from the door, and there is parking, which in Faceby matters more than it sounds.
For groceries you go to Stokesley, about six kilometres north-east, where the shops gather around the High Street. Faceby itself has no shop, bakery, butcher, deli or farm shop today, though it did once: Faceby House, dated 1716 on its door lintel, was formerly listed as the home of Beusley, a general dealer.
St Mary Magdalene's stands above the houses where two green lanes cross, one coming off the moor and one from Whorlton, with the long view running south to the woods on Whorl Hill. The church you see is Victorian, built in 1874-75, but it is full of older stone. When the rebuild was planned, the Revd George Prowde raised £1,000 and insisted that the Norman arch and the old masonry be kept. So a nearly complete 12th-century doorway — roll, hollow and chevron mouldings, framed by St Andrew's crosses — was reset into the new walls, more Norman voussoirs went into the chancel arch, and the font was cut from a medieval column with a spurred base. Temple Moore extended the chancel in 1911. The oak furniture is by Robert Thompson of Kilburn; look for the small carved mouse he signed his work with. The organ came from a country house near Wolverhampton and was restored in 2005.
The village is a single line of houses on the western escarpment of the moors, the older cottages east of Bank Lane and the newer ones west, most of them set back in large plots behind low hedges. Brick and pantile dominate, with some white render, the pub included. In summer the approach is leafy and the place feels cut off. Carlton Moor rises behind it to the east, close to a thousand feet within a mile and a half of the village.
That climb is the main reason walkers come. The Cleveland Way drops to cross Scugdale just over a mile away, and from Faceby you can join it for the escarpment section over Live Moor, Cringle Moor and Cold Moor, or take the quieter lanes, a less strenuous alternative with escarpment views. A 6.4-mile circuit links the village with Swainby and returns past Whorlton's church and castle, a scheduled site that stayed in use right through the medieval period, its Norman defences rebuilt as a 14th-century tower house. Parking at the Faceby end is very limited, so an early start helps.
The nearest railway station is Battersby, a little over six miles away as the crow flies, on the unstaffed Esk Valley line between Middlesbrough and Whitby. The A172 runs a kilometre to the north, and the 80 and 89 buses call through on their way between Northallerton and Stokesley.
The Domesday surveyors, who spelt the name Feizbi, recorded four households here in 1086. By the 1851 census it held 32 houses and 140 people — a publican, a blacksmith, a shoemaker, tailors, a butcher, a carrier, a miller and three Stanger brothers who made carts. Within two years a Latter-day Saint branch had formed, and in February 1855 a large party, mostly from the Stanger and Etherington families, left the village for America and eventually Utah.
From 1634 the church ran the Lazenby Charity, handing out food and fuel to the poor of the parish. Bread and coal were still being given out in the village into the 1970s.