Kilburn

Mice on the Square

The Forresters Arms on Kilburn's cobbled square is furnished with work from the nearby Mouseman workshop, much of it carrying a carved mouse. Its beach-cobble fireplace burns oak offcuts from next door. The doubled "r" in "Forresters" has become the pub's established spelling. Carpenter George Bolton ran it with his family by 1841; his son Jonah had taken over by 1871, and Jonah's children George and Fanny continued until 1960. Dogs are welcome, with a garden and seats facing the square; Black Sheep and Theakston Best Bitters are joined by a changing Ossett ale.

Beside the churchyard gates, the village war memorial carries a watchful Raisdale-stone soldier carved by sculptor Charles A. Barker for Robert Thompson's firm. At its 1922 dedication, torrential rain sent the service into the church before the unveiling went ahead outside.

Oak, Stone and the Hillside

The carved mouse became Robert Thompson's signature, registered as a trademark in 1931. His forty-strong team won commissions from York Minster, Peterborough Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, and Robert Thompson's Craftsmen still works English oak in Kilburn. The showroom displays furniture Thompson made himself, early carved signatures and present-day pieces; visitors can also enter the viewing gallery.

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 exposed limestone. 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.

The waymarked White Horse Trail makes a 1.5-mile circuit through Kilburn Woods, climbing steep sections and steps beside the figure and following a stretch of the Cleveland Way for views across the Hambleton vale. A separate two-mile village loop climbs Brow Bank to High Kilburn's green and returns through kissing gates and the churchyard. For a longer day, an eight-mile circuit reaches Lake Gormire and 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 lie about six miles west. Hodgsons service 59 links Thirsk, Kilburn's square and Coxwold. The White Horse watches over the road out.