The chapel at Houlsyke went up in 1853 on a plot given by a man named J. Dale, paid for by local subscription, and held services for more than a century before it became someone's house. Old maps labelled it Zoar Chapel and spelled the settlement Howlsike. It is the sort of building you notice only once someone points out that the windows are too regular for a farmhouse.
The rest of the hamlet is farms and cottages, sandstone under pantile, with timber sash windows and long low agricultural ranges set into a wooded hillside above Eskdale. The buildings gather loosely around Brook House Farm. Small streams run through the gardens and between the fields, and the lanes open now and then onto views down the surrounding valleys. The National Park Authority describes the effect as "distinctly tranquil," and on a still afternoon that is exactly the word.
Two of the houses are listed. Brook House Farmhouse is a mid-to-late-eighteenth-century sandstone building with a hearth-passage plan and a six-bay outbuilding range carrying stable, cart and loft doors. Houlsyke House is older still, probably a late-seventeenth-century longhouse, raised and altered by later generations.
There is no pub and no shop in Houlsyke, so the working part of a stay happens a mile or so away in Lealholm, where the River Esk runs over a set of stepping stones and the unstaffed station sits on the Esk Valley line between Middlesbrough and Whitby. The Board Inn stands by the green and the river, an eighteenth-century stone pub run by John Davis and Adele Wattam, with a locals' bar, a lounge, a riverside patio and three rotating Yorkshire guest ales. Dogs are welcome; one recent visitor arrived with a giant schnauzer and reported no difficulty.
For dinner it is worth the short run to Castleton and The Eskdale. Kirsty and Marcus Boxshall-Smith first saw the pub in 2014, had their second date in its beer garden, and bought it in 2019. The kitchen does beer-battered haddock with triple-cooked chips and minted peas, a burger built on salt-beef brisket, smoked cheddar and bacon jam, wild-garlic and ricotta gnocchi, Moroccan-spiced venison loin, and treacle tart with orange-marmalade ice cream. Four rescue collies live on the premises. In summer the pub runs Eskfest, a day of music, a beer tent and a barbecue.
Walkers have plenty to go at. A seven-mile circular from Lealholm station climbs through meadow and pasture to Houlsyke and on by Oakley Side to Danby Beacon, with views out to Scaling Dam, the North Sea and Teesside. The waymarked Esk Valley Walk, marked by a leaping salmon, passes through on its thirty-seven miles from Castleton to Whitby. Cyclists and walkers can break at the Yorkshire Cycle Hub in Great Fryup Dale for homemade cake and the Great Fryup Breakfast.
Families tend to make for Danby Lodge, where the Danby Den playground has zip wires, rope bridges and a nest tower. Danby Castle, traditionally associated with Catherine Parr, who lived there as John Neville's wife or widow before marrying Henry VIII, stands partly ruined nearby, though it now hosts weddings and access is best checked first.
Houlsyke was once a bacon village. Farmers brought pigs here to be slaughtered and cured, and in the early 1860s the meat was carted over the moor to Whitby and shipped to London. The pigs are long gone, and the streams still run between the gardens.