Hinderwell

St Hilda’s Well and the Hidden Coast

A spring rises on the hill above the High Street, walled into a stone chamber with a trough and a flight of steps down to the water. Legend has it that St Hilda produced it during a drought. Its water was believed to heal eye ailments, and the well became a medieval pilgrimage site. The name Hinderwell comes from the Old English Hildewella, Hild's well, and the spring is now a scheduled monument; Hilda Palmer restored its cover in 1912, and on the 1894 Ordnance Survey map a hand pump stands over it.

The village is a single long street in a sheltered dip about a mile inland. A low rise between here and the coast hides the sea, so you would not guess from the High Street how close the cliffs are. The land around is mostly arable, with wooded Well Bank dropping away to the west and Newton Mulgrave Moor closing off the south-western horizon. The street mixes rural cottages and working farms with substantial late-Victorian houses, built on money from the ironstone mines and coastal port trade, which give parts of it a more town-like look than the setting would suggest.

A Village Pub and Shared Spaces

The Badger Hounds, at number 39, took on a new landlord in January 2026 and a new chef that May. It serves Sunday lunch and has a beer garden, a car park, a real fire and a dartboard, with quiz nights and live music. Dogs are welcome in the bar and lounge, where diners can eat, but not in the restaurant.

Hinderwell also has free community tennis courts, the Rookery community woodland, a sports field used for cricket and football, and a village hall for indoor sport and events.

Village Provisions and an Ancient Church

For provisions, R Lyth & Sons has been the family butcher since 1930, at number 72, selling fresh local meat, pies and pasties, Stonehouse Bakery bread, jams and chutneys, plus milk, groceries and newspapers. Hinderwell Fish & Chip Shop at number 56 serves haddock or cod cooked to order with crinkle-cut chips and mushy peas. Volunteers run the Old School Tea Room and Village Hub at number 6, serving homemade quiche, soup, ploughman's lunches, pork pie with salad, fruit scones and cakes, with vegetarian and vegan choices.

St Hilda's church was rebuilt in 1773 on a much older site, its west tower added in 1817. Inside are a Norman pillar piscina, fragments of Saxon carving, an oak screen, and a west gallery and organ brought from Selby Abbey; the registers begin in 1601. Domesday recorded a church here in 1086, along with meadow and woodland.

From Ironstone Railway to Coastal Trails

The railway reached Hinderwell in 1883 and carried ironstone and fish. At the height of summer 1938, the coast route had 17 weekday trains from Middlesbrough to Scarborough and 18 in the opposite direction. The last trains ran on 3 May 1958, and the difficult line formally closed on 5 May. The station site is now a small industrial estate and a play area. The almshouses began in 1888 as Corner House, combining five cottages, a shop and a public reading room; a billiard table bought for it in 1901 cost ten pounds, nineteen shillings and sixpence.

Hinderwell sits on the A174 between Loftus and Whitby, with Arriva's X4 and X4A buses stopping at the war memorial; Saltburn and Whitby, on opposite sides, are the practical railheads. Staithes, with its cobbled lanes and fishing-and-painting history, is about a mile off, and a mile of the Cleveland Way from there reaches the hamlet of Port Mulgrave, where the ruined ironstone harbour can be seen below the cliff. Runswick Bay, also about a mile away, has a sandy beach, rockpools, fossils and a single white thatched former coastguard cottage on the shore. St Hilda's Way runs forty miles from the holy well to Whitby Abbey, where Hild founded her monastery in 657.

Well Dressing and Cleveland Bays

In July the village holds a gala and dresses the well; in August comes Hinderwell Show, which began as an argument between two men over who owned the better Cleveland Bay foal, and still keeps its Cleveland Bay classes.