Glaisdale

Bridge, Station and Hillside

Beggar's Bridge sits at the bottom of the village, a single stone arch over the River Esk with a paved roadway six and a half feet wide, carrying the initials of Thomas Ferris of Hull above the date 1619. It was built for packhorses. Near the bridge is Glaisdale station, on the Esk Valley line between Middlesbrough and Whitby, where the trains stop unstaffed and the cobbled approach is uneven underfoot.

From here the village goes up. Glaisdale is dispersed across the south side of Esk Dale, at the mouth of its own side valley, and the road climbs from the river past the Carr End terraces toward the higher houses. It is a scattered place rather than a street, and the buildings leave gaps that open onto the dale. Arthur Mee, writing in 1941, called it "a village of old and new houses dotted on the hillside climbing to Glaisdale Moor," which still describes the walk up.

Pub, Store and Village Life

The Arncliffe Arms stands on that climb, a beamed pub and B&B that began as a coaching inn in the early nineteenth century and now sits on the Coast to Coast route. There is a quieter dining room, a pool table and darts, six en-suite rooms upstairs, and a garden with picnic benches at the back looking out over the countryside. Black Sheep Best Bitter is the regular ale, with a couple of changing beers alongside. The kitchen leans on locally sourced meat and fresh fish, and Sunday lunch is the meal it's known for. Dogs are welcome.

The village store and Post Office is at 20 High Terrace, handling mail, cash and bill payments, which is the sort of shop a hillside village is glad to keep. There is also Off the Rails, a local business running baking workshops.

Stone Trods and the River Esk

A featured walk starts at the station. The circular to Egton Bridge and back is five miles and takes around three and a half hours, over field paths, woodland tracks and stone trods, with several stiles, slippery trods in wet weather, two steep climbs and a stretch of nearly two miles along minor roads. The trods are slab-paved paths, most laid between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries; a particularly fine one, the Monks' Trod through East Arnecliff Wood, carries you back toward Glaisdale. Farm animals are common along the way, so dogs go on a short lead.

The Esk runs wooded below the village and holds herons, dippers, kingfishers and otters. It is Yorkshire's principal salmon and sea-trout river, with the gravels at Limber an important spawning reach.

Church, Legend and Ironstone

Above the river, the Church of St Thomas was built in 1792–94 and remodelled in 1876–79, herringbone-tooled sandstone under a green-slate roof, with a small Georgian Gothick nave and a sundial dated 1793 on its south wall.

The bridge below carries the older story. Legend has it that Ferris was a poor Egton farmer's son, refused as a "beggar" by the family of Agnes Richardson; that a flood kept him from crossing the Esk to say goodbye before he went to sea; and that he came back wealthy, married her, and built the crossing. The lower terraces of sandstone and slate belong to a plainer history, put up for the men who worked the ironstone.

Rail, Bus and the Quiet Coach

Buses run too: the 96 from Lealholm through to Whitby, and a demand-responsive service toward Danby and Castleton. The station is a practical way to arrive and leave, where a little free library called The Quiet Coach lends out books to anyone waiting for a train.