Grosmont

A Village Arranged Around the Railway

The gates come down across Front Street when a train is due, and a locomotive drifts through the middle of the village trailing steam over the cottages. Grosmont is arranged around its railway the way other villages are arranged around a green. Everything sits low in the wooded Esk Valley, at the point where the Murk Esk runs into the River Esk, and Front Street climbs steeply away from a core of white-and-turquoise railway buildings, level crossing and tracks that vanish beneath Lease Rigg into two parallel tunnels, one old and one later. The houses are sandstone cottages and miners' terraces, squeezed between river, railway and rising valley sides, and you reach them along minor roads between Egton and Sleights that are steep enough to make the arrival feel earned.

Say the name "Grow-mont." It is not the Grosmont in Monmouthshire; there is no castle here, and Henry of Grosmont belongs to the other place. What is here instead is a working steam depot at the end of the street.

The village's only conventional pub is the Station Tavern, a stone railway inn on Front Street standing immediately beside the station. Inside there is a separate bar, dining rooms, a real fire and rooms to stay in; outside there is a patio rather than a lawned garden. It was built around 1835 for the Whitby and Pickering Railway Company and licensed to a man named John Buttery, and it began life as the Tunnel Inn. It may well be the railway's first purpose-built permanent building. The Grade II listing notes a Doric porch, ogee-headed windows on the ground floor and tooled sandstone, and the workshops, smithy and former tenements alongside were all built for the railway too.

Two Very Different Village Bars

The pub is family-run and takes dogs; one recent staying guest arrived to find a dog bed, a water bowl and the offer of a cooked breakfast for the dog. There are usually two real ales on, sometimes three in summer, with Black Sheep Best Bitter and Wainwright Gold among the names that turn up. The food is home-cooked British pub cooking, and recent diners have spoken well of steak pie and parmo. One guest called it a "lovely warm welcoming traditional pub," which is the kind of description a village pub earns rather than advertises. Food provision has shifted under recent management, so it is worth confirming or booking ahead rather than assuming the kitchen is open when you arrive.

There is a second place to drink, though it comes with conditions. The Grosmont Crossing Club is a villager-owned, not-for-profit members' real-ale club, set upstairs in a former Co-operative storage bay opposite the stations. Railway volunteers founded it during a spell when Grosmont had no pub at all, and the room is hung with railway signs, photographs and more than a thousand beer mats. Up to four changing regional cask ales are on, alongside Preservation Ale, the club's own exclusive 4% blonde; more than fourteen hundred different beers have passed across the bar since it opened, and in 2026 it marked its twenty-eighth year. CAMRA named it Cleveland branch Club of the Year in 2024. Holidaymakers can buy weekly membership and be signed in; you ring the street-door bell to get in, and the bar and toilets are up stairs, so it does not suit everyone. Andrew Jeffery serves behind the bar and sits on the committee, and a fellow barman, Tom "Dibbsy" Dibbs, plays the club piano when asked.

Cafés, Shops and Working Makers

For daytime eating the village is unusually well supplied for its size. The Old School Coffee Shop occupies the former schoolhouse near the line, with a wood-burning stove and a garden, and does freshly ground coffee, Yorkshire and speciality teas, home-baked cakes and traybakes, sandwiches, salads and soup. The scones draw particular praise; other things people mention include Hummingbird cake, cherry frangipane tart, cheese scones, wood-fired pizza, flatbread with belly pork and a bacon roll. Hazelwood Tea Rooms is a traditional tearoom with outdoor seating and highchairs, and its house speciality is the Grosmont Tart, invented by the proprietor; it has baked gluten-free cakes on the premises since 2015 and also does pork pie with pickle and a lemon-glazed tart. Up at the station itself the Grosmont Station Tea Room looks directly onto the heritage line and opens when the railway is running, and the church runs a volunteer café within its modern west-end rooms. Grosmont is also the departure point for the railway's separate Pullman dining service.

The shops lean, understandably, towards the railway. The Grosmont Co-operative Society is the practical one: a community-owned general store and Post Office on Front Street, with groceries, wines and spirits, walker snacks and cash withdrawals over the Post Office counter. It was established in 1867 during the iron boom and is the oldest independent retail co-operative in Britain, still going, still volunteer-run. On the same street the Geall Gallery is a working studio where the landscape painter Chris Geall can often be watched at the easel; he makes large palette-knife oils of the moors and the north-east coast, trained first as an engineer at Edinburgh and then as a potter, bought the gallery in 1998 and came back to it in 2011 after a spell in Whitby. The potter and illustrator Abigail Featherstone shows her stoneware there too. There is a second-hand bookshop with a railway collection running to around seven thousand titles, a shop opposite the station selling second-hand die-cast model railways and buses, and two railway-run shops: a 1950s-themed station shop and the Shed Shop out beyond the pedestrian tunnel at the engine sheds, which sells nameplates, model stock and NYMR exclusives, with the money going back into the not-for-profit line. Yorkshire Cycle Hub in the village hires and repairs bikes.

Trails from the Tracks and a Church Above

Grosmont is a good base for walks, and the walks are laid out for it. The Grosmont–Goathland Rail Trail runs three and a half miles along George Stephenson's original 1836 alignment, by way of Beck Hole, past the industrial remains at Esk Valley Mine and Beck Hole Ironworks, with interpretation at the deep-mine shaft and engine base. Walk one direction and take the steam train back, and you have a railway-themed circuit that makes a good half-day. A shorter circular from Grosmont to Beck Hole and back is worth timing for May, when the bluebells are at their strongest; Beck Hole's tiny Birch Hall Inn makes a natural halfway target, though it belongs to Beck Hole and not to Grosmont. For a longer day, section four of the Esk Valley Walk runs eight miles down the river to Whitby pier, and the Coast to Coast Path passes straight through the village and past the Station Tavern before climbing steeply out towards Robin Hood's Bay. Grosmont station sits on Northern's Esk Valley Line between Middlesbrough and Whitby as well as the heritage railway, so several of these linear walks can be done one-way with a train home; the number 96 bus links the village to Whitby, Sleights, Egton and Lealholm, and there are public toilets in the village and at the station.

The church stands above all this. St Matthew's was built in 1875 by Armfield and Bottomley to replace an earlier church of 1840, and was largely paid for by the Bagnall brothers, the local ironmasters, and by Mrs Mary Clarke, sister of the Whitby navigator and polar explorer William Scoresby. It is local sandstone ashlar, with a Welsh slate roof laid in a two-colour geometric pattern, lancet windows and a west rose window. Inside are a stone reredos with a mosaic Crucifixion, an early Norman font, a Caen-stone pulpit and, from the late 1940s, an altar by Robert "Mouseman" Thompson. The nave roof is an under-boarded hammer-beam construction without tie bars, and at the opening the architect claimed, "The roof construction is, we believe, the first ever designed or carried out on this plan." It is not, quite: the form closely resembles medieval roofs at San Zeno in Verona and San Stefano in Venice. But it is a striking thing to stand under, and the claim was made in good faith.

Iron, Decline and the Return of Steam

That the church could be built so grandly at all is down to iron. The railway cutting exposed the Pecten ironstone seam during construction, and by 1836 ore was being sent from Grosmont to a furnace at Birtley. The Bagnalls opened their ironworks in the 1860s, and at its peak three furnaces got through around a thousand tonnes of ore a week, some five hundred people worked there, and the population climbed to roughly sixteen hundred by 1880. There was a brickworks too, from 1870, whose chimney of 1902 stood about 120 metres. The furnaces closed in 1891, the population fell to 872 within a decade, and the ironworks site is now the green National Park car park; low humps in the grass are the base of a blast furnace and a boiler-house chimney, and the disturbed ground has since been colonised by unusual plants such as twayblade and sickle medick. Long before any of it, Grosmont Priory stood beside the Esk, one of only three Grandmontine houses in England, its foundations still traceable near Priory Farm. The comic actor Ian Carmichael lived here for many years with his wife, the novelist Kate Fenton, and died in the village in 2010.

The railway itself was rescued rather than kept: the main line closed to passengers in 1965, a group started meeting in 1967 to save it, and the first preserved steam train ran from Grosmont in 1971. King Charles III came in 2023 for the fiftieth anniversary. On an ordinary afternoon, though, the best thing to do is stand at the crossing when the gates are down, watch a locomotive ease through under a plume of steam, and wait for the barriers to lift so you can cross the street to the shop.