The Mill Inn carries its name along the roof ridge, in letters large enough to read from the road. It stands where a mill once turned beside Jugger Howe Beck, and the buildings alongside ground grain until just after the Second World War. The McGregor family held the property from the 1930s; after Hamish McGregor died it was sold in 2022, the inn going with the former wheelhouse, grassland and woodland. It trades now as a free house, known for its pork pies and Guinness. There is a small south-facing lawn at the front, behind drystone walling.
For a proper meal you go to The Grainary, at Keasbeck Hill Farm — a restaurant with rooms and holiday cottages on a working farm, run by the Jackson family since 2021. The kitchen has sent out beer-battered haddock with a caper-berry dip and a pepper stuffed with giant couscous. In season, guests who book can see the lambing.
For everyday supplies you drive the five and a half miles to Burniston, which has a post office, a garage and pubs of its own.
Harwood Dale does not gather into a single street. It is a dispersed settlement, its farms and clusters of houses set apart by rolling ground so that one is often hidden from the next — sandstone walls, red pantiles, drystone field boundaries and broad grassy verges. "Harwood Dale lies in the peaceful, pastoral landscape of the limestone dales in the eastern part of the National Park," is how the National Park describes it.
What passes for a village core groups a former Wesleyan Methodist chapel, the old smithy and a red telephone kiosk of the K6 pattern. The smithy is worth a look for its wide boarded doors; inside were two furnaces with hand bellows, two anvils and two water troughs, installed by an earlier owner's grandfather.
The village has two churches, both named for St Margaret. The present one, Early English Gothic, replaced its predecessor in 1862: a rectangular nave, a semicircular chancel and a small west tower with a single bell, its chancel windows showing Salvator Mundi, St Peter and St Margaret. The older St Margaret's sits roofless on a walled hilltop, a grey-sandstone rectangle built in 1634 by Sir Thomas Posthumous Hoby in memory of his wife, Lady Margaret, who had died the year before. Lady Margaret kept a diary between 1599 and 1605 — the earliest known diary written by a woman in English — recording her prayers, her accounts and the running of the estate.
Walkers can take the 8.7-mile circuit that starts by St Margaret's, climbing to open moorland and returning through Scar Wood and along Jugger Howe Beck, with distant views to Scarborough Castle and the North Sea. Take an OS map and expect livestock in the fields.
Harwood Dale has no bus stop of its own, so a car is easiest; Scarborough and its station are about nine miles off, Whitby twelve. At the lych-gate of the newer church, a board names the twenty-four local men who went to the First World War.