Iburndale

A hamlet hidden by trees

The Row sits on a triangle of grass where four roads meet, and the cottages of Iburndale gather close around it: a road-and-a-half of sandstone walls, red clay pantiles, sash windows and stone chimneys, most of them a storey and a half or two storeys high. Mature trees line the roads and the beck and hide much of the hamlet from wider views. It is a place you arrive in before you have quite seen it.

Little Beck does the work of separating Iburndale from Sleights, running north through a narrow wooded valley to meet the River Esk, with the steep valley side and Goathland Moor rising behind. Several useful shops and services are in nearby Sleights, down Iburndale Lane.

Sleights for the table

That includes the bakery. Botham's at 73 Coach Road is the fifth generation of a firm that began when Elizabeth Botham sold bread and cakes from a basket at Whitby market more than 150 years ago. The counter runs to Whitby Lemon Buns, Yorkshire Brack, Plum Bread, Shah Ginger Biscuits and Chocolate Japonaise, alongside fresh bread, cream cakes and takeaway sandwiches. At number 81, Radford's butchers works with local farmers on beef, poultry, pork and lamb, makes its own sausages and marinated meats, and keeps fruit, veg and ready meals besides. Eskdale Fisheries at 159 does the fish and chips.

For a pub, the Salmon Leap stands beside Sleights station with a real fire and a large rear garden that looks out towards the summer steam trains. Breakfast is cooked with the hotel's own fresh eggs. Its own description offers one further amenity: "We also have a cockerel for your early morning wake up call."

Rail, road and stained glass

The station is on Northern's Esk Valley line between Middlesbrough and Whitby, a single unstaffed platform, step-free, with a shelter and a ticket machine, but no toilets, waiting room or refreshments. Whitby, with its harbour and abbey ruins, is three miles on. By road you come down the steep Blue Bank on the A169; the Arriva 95 links Sleights with Ruswarp and Whitby, and the Coastliner 840 runs the A169 between Leeds, York and the coast. On the corner of Iburndale Lane, the church of St John the Evangelist was built around 1895 to one of Ewan Christian's last designs, with stained glass by C. E. Kempe and a 1995 aisle window designed by local schoolchildren.

Ironstone hopes and a darker tale

The valley has been quieter than it once hoped. In 1858 the Iburndale Iron Company advertised that ironstone had been found here, but the mines never amounted to much, and the earthworks of those 1850s trials still sit in the ground below Blue Bank. Local tradition holds that in 1719 a woman named Meg Collet, called a witch, was ducked and drowned in the beck.

Back by the beck

The walking starts at the door. Parish circulars climb through Battle Bank Woods and the restored Tom Bells Lane, drop back through fields with views over Iburndale and Littlebeck, pass the old corn mill and return beside the water along the line of its former mill race. South of here, Little Beck Wood is a reserve of oak, ash, alder and cherry, steep and unsurfaced underfoot, carrying a path down to the Falling Foss waterfall and a tearoom that opens in season. Dippers and grey wagtails work the water, woodpeckers and nuthatches the trees, and in spring the ground fills with bluebells, primroses and orchids. Then the path brings you back beside the beck, into the cluster of cottages you set out from.