A channel of water runs along the edge of the village street, cobbled with rounded pebbles and flowing constantly. It was cut in the late eighteenth century as part of the Hackness estate's water management, when Kirk Beck was diverted around the churchyard into a fishpond and a separate race was set to serve the mill. It still runs today, past cottages of sandstone and red pantile with white-painted timber sashes.
Hackness sits at the bottom of a sheltered valley where several smaller valleys meet before draining south to the River Derwent. Lowdales Beck and Crossdales Beck cross the floor, and wooded sides rise steeply on either hand. The village comes in two parts. A belt of trees along Back Race Beck separates the cottages on Broxa Lane and Storr Lane from the more formal cluster of St Peter's, the school and Hackness Hall behind its high stone walls.
These days Hackness has no pub or shop of its own. It once had two. A Johnstone Arms stood at the southern park entrance on a 1723 estate map, and the Everley Hotel closed in 2011. Both are gone; the nearest pub meals are in East Ayton and Burniston. Scarborough, four and a half miles southeast, is the nearest station and the obvious base for trains and shopping; the roads in are all minor ones, and the nearest regular bus stop is at West Ayton, some three and a half miles short of the village.
The Oak Wheel at Burniston, run by Shaun and Kate Hull, is a six-room inn with a log fire and garden seating. Its kitchen turns out steak, ale and mushroom pie, slow-roasted belly pork, a Glaves of Brompton sausage wheel, chicken balti and beer-battered haddock, with a chickpea, spinach and sweet-potato curry alongside. Timothy Taylor Boltmaker and Landlord are the regular cask ales, and dogs are welcome when food is not being served. Closer in, the Denison Arms on Main Street in East Ayton has real ales, a beer garden and room for families.
The walking is the reason to stay. From Old Man's Mouth Picnic Site a level boardwalk runs 1.7 miles beside the Derwent through Forge Valley, an ancient broadleaved wood thick with wild garlic and wood anemones in spring; nuthatch, deer and crayfish keep to it. The valley was carved when an Ice Age lake in the Hackness basin overflowed about ten thousand years ago. A steeper 2.7-mile circular leaves the village street past the war memorial and Mill Farm and climbs to Walker Flat Wood for views over the estate. The footpath through Wrench Green is closed for repairs until 5 May 2027 or completion of repairs, whichever is earlier, so check the notices on site before you set out.
The place is older than any of it. In 680 Abbess Hild of Whitby founded a religious community here; Bede names two of its nuns, Begu and Frigyth, and describes how Begu saw Hild's death in a dream. St Peter's still holds two Anglo-Saxon cross fragments carved with interlace, a head and two griffins, along with eight fifteenth-century misericords and a tall octagonal font cover. The chancel arch is eleventh century or older.
The village you walk through is not where the medieval one stood. Sir Richard Vanden Bempde Johnstone inherited the estate in 1792, cleared the old village and the Elizabethan manor, moved the residents to new cottages out of sight of the hall, and in 1798 diverted the public road to make room for a lake. The hall carries the inscription "Peace be within these walls 1796" across its entrance pediment. A fire gutted it in 1910, and Walter Brierley rebuilt it inside the original walls within the year. It remains a private family home.
Two centuries before any of that, Lady Margaret Hoby kept a diary at Hackness, running from 9 August 1599 to 21 July 1605 and reckoned the earliest known diary written by a woman in English. It is primarily concerned with prayer and reading, alongside household and estate management. On 5 May 1601 she walked to Munkman's to look at a calf that had two heads, four ears and a windpipe to each. She wrote it down and dated it.