Fangdale Beck

Stone, Water and Working History

A tree-lined beck runs through the middle of Fangdale Beck, past old farm barns and an old chapel, at the foot of Bilsdale West Moor. The hamlet is a scatter of sandstone houses with red clay pantile roofs, most of them a storey and a half with a barn behind, small gardens, dry-stone walls and timber gates. There are no kerbs and no road markings. You notice how quiet it is before you notice why.

The Forge is the building with a history you can read off the stone. Its centre section is dated 1723, with later additions through the 18th and 19th centuries, and it is named for what happened here: John Wood, a plough maker who learned the craft elsewhere, set up a foundry at Fangdale Beck in the late 19th century. Nearby, Fangdale Beck Farmhouse dates from the early 1700s, herringbone-tooled sandstone with Yorkshire sash windows, a cart door and vent slits. In the back kitchen there is still an original fire-beam and heck.

A Lost School and Moorland Paths

There was a school here from 1814. It did not survive; the one at Chop Gate did.

The walking is the reason most people come. The parish's own long route runs ten miles and about five hours, leaving the village for the Grange and Hill End, crossing the Tripsdale ford by Kay Nest and William Beck Farm to Chop Gate, and returning over Trennet Bank, Cock Howe and the Bilsdale mast. Shorter legs climb straight onto the moor at Moor Gate or head south towards Laskill. The Fangdale Walk covers 8.5 miles with 390 metres of ascent, crossing the B1257 in the village and coming back along the west side past a farm called Stingamires. On the hillsides you can still make out the shale tips left by Bilsdale's 19th-century jet mining, and hardy Swaledales grazing the moorland strays as they have done for longer than the mining.

Dale Inns and Local Provisions

The village itself has no pub these days. A nearby option is the Buck Inn at Chop Gate, run by Helen and Wolfgang, who grow or source much of the food within twenty miles. It pours Timothy Taylor by handpull alongside German keg beer, keeps a garden and a monthly folk night, welcomes muddy boots and dogs, and has held a place in the Good Beer Guide for ten years. Further down Bilsdale, the Sun Inn has been in the Ainsley family since 1823. Beside it stands Spout House, the old inn: a Grade I sixteenth-century longhouse with cruck trusses, thatch and built-in beds, licensed as the Sun Inn in 1714 and closed when the present pub was built in 1914. It kept its furniture. For provisions, Lordstones sits at the top of Carlton Bank with a farm shop and café, its Belted Galloway steaks from beef reared within a mile.

Roads, Abbey and Dale Church

Fangdale Beck sits directly on the B1257, the old Helmsley-to-Stokesley drovers' road, with Battersby the nearest station about eight miles off and a summer Moorsbus service between Stokesley and Helmsley on weekends. South towards Helmsley, Rievaulx Abbey fills the Rye valley, founded in 1132 as the first Cistercian house in northern England; the Rievaulx Terrace above it, with its two Neoclassical temples, reopened this July. The church that serves the dale, St John the Evangelist at Bilsdale Midcable, was designed by Temple Moore, its foundation stone laid by the Earl of Feversham in 1893 and the building consecrated in 1896, with an octagonal broach spire above a Lakeland-slate roof.

The Ainsley Line

At the Sun Inn the tenancy still passes down the Ainsley line, and by tradition the eldest son is named William.