Kilburn

The Mouse in the Pub

The bar of the Forresters Arms is furnished with work from the nearby Mouseman workshops, and much of it carries a small carved mouse. The pub stands on Kilburn's cobbled square, and its main fireplace is built from beach cobbles and burns oak offcuts from the workshop next door. The name is a mistake that stuck: a replacement sign spelled it "Forresters", and the village decided to keep it. George Bolton, a carpenter, was running the place with his family by 1841; by 1871 his son Jonah had taken over, and Jonah's children George and Fanny kept it going until 1960.

It is still the village's pub. Dogs are welcome, there is a garden and seating at the front facing the square, and the beer runs to Black Sheep Best Bitter and Theakston Best Bitter, with a changing Ossett ale that rewards asking what is on.

Oak, Stone and the Hillside

The workshop behind that furniture is Robert Thompson's. Thompson began carving a mouse into his furniture and registered it as a trademark in 1931; his firm of forty took commissions from York Minster, Peterborough Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, and the family still works English oak in the village. The showroom and weekday viewing gallery are open, where you can see Thompson's own pieces and the early carved signatures, though it's worth checking opening times for the visitor centre and café before you visit.

Kilburn comes in two parts. Low Kilburn sits in a hollow of stone cottages, the cobbled square, an oak tree and a stream; High Kilburn occupies the higher ground above it, where Temple House stands out in mottled pink brick with Venetian windows and a parapet, deliberately unlike everything around it. Above both, cut into the escarpment, is the White Horse: 314 feet of pale hillside looking south over the Vale of York.

Making and Climbing the White Horse

It was proposed by Thomas Taylor, a Kilburn man, and laid out in 1857 by the schoolmaster John Hodgson with his pupils and thirty-one villagers, who stripped the turf and limed the bare sandstone. Taylor emigrated to Australia and left no money for its upkeep, so for years villagers weeded and whitened it by hand; between grooming it faded to the point of earning the nickname "The Old Grey Mare". A 1923 Yorkshire Post appeal saved it. In 1939 it was covered with netting so enemy aircraft could not use it to navigate, and after the war Robert Thompson sent his own men up to re-whiten it for nearly twenty years. Forestry England now keeps it in chalk chippings.

You can walk to it. The waymarked White Horse Trail is a mile and a half of steep sections and steps beside the figure, joining a stretch of the Cleveland Way with the whole Hambleton vale laid out below. Shorter is the two-mile loop up Brow Bank to High Kilburn's green and back through kissing gates and the churchyard; longer is the eight-mile circuit down to Lake Gormire and up onto Sutton Bank, where James Herriot called the view "the finest in England".

Mice among the Norman Stones

St Mary's is worth the churchyard visit for more than the view. The Norman south doorway has three orders of chevrons, there is a bell dated 1684 and a 1601 "Breeches Bible" in a Thompson-made case, and the church holds nearly fifty carved mice for anyone inclined to count. Thompson himself is buried here, close to the workshop he never really left.

Arriving beneath the Horse

Thirsk and its station are about six miles west, and the Hodgsons 59 bus stops on the square, with two listed journeys on Mondays and Fridays — worth checking before you rely on it. The horse is watching.