Langdale End

A Hamlet of Field and Forest

The village hall is a shed of corrugated metal, set back behind the main line of houses, and the old chapel beside it has a slate roof. A red K6 telephone box stands nearby as a fixed point. The houses face the road from behind grassy verges, built in sandstone under red clay pantiles with brick chimneys, and where a boundary is needed there are dry-stone walls, timber gates and stock fencing. Howden Farm forms a key focal point at the entrance, and it holds the eye.

This is a linear farming hamlet, a single string of buildings among open fields close to Hackness, at the northern end of the wooded Forge Valley. The wooded Derwent slopes and the open Upper Langdale fields sit in close, marked contrast. The National Park's own design guide calls it "a small, quiet rural hamlet surrounded by open fields," and it does not pretend otherwise.

The Pub Rooms and the Dawnay Church

The Moorcock Inn is closed, and has been for a long time. It began as a late-18th-century farmhouse with attached stables and cart-sheds, and the Martindale family ran the front parlour as a pub from 1893 to 1989. Inside are horizontal sliding sash windows, exposed ground-floor beams, plank doors on H and L hinges, and a Candler of Scarborough cooking range. Beer once came through a hatch to both bars, usually from Slater's or Wold Top. A 1992 restoration enlarged the trading space but kept the room divisions and the cellar-servery.

St Peter's Church sits on the road just south of the hamlet. Mary Isabel, Viscountess Downe, built it in 1884, plain and rectangular in a 13th-century Gothic style, with a shallow chancel, a south porch and a single bell in the west-gable bellcote. A large churchyard cross remembers the Hon. G. C. Dawnay, who died in 1889.

Coptic Life and Woodland Trails

A little way on, and harder to explain in a place this size, is the monastery of St Athanasius, which describes itself as the first Coptic monastery in Great Britain. Its twenty-three acres hold a church, a library, a bookshop, monks' dormitories, three cottages and a smaller Chapel of St Anthony. The community grows vegetables, keeps animals and makes its own cheese and honey. Visitors are welcome, but every visit must be arranged first by telephone or email.

For walking, the Jerry Noddle Trail runs a two-mile circuit from Bickley Gate in Dalby Forest, mostly flat and on gravel forest roads, with views over the Upper Langdale valley and Fiona Bowley's 2021 sandstone Winged Sheep Aedicula at the viewpoint. Forge Valley Woods, a National Nature Reserve along the Derwent, has a boardwalk giving fairly level valley-floor access and nuthatches, redstarts and blackcaps in the trees. Further off, the Bridestones are strange Jurassic sandstone shapes among heather moorland, reached from the Hole of Horcum or through Dalby.

The Drive for Dinner

There is no working pub in the village, so meals mean a drive. The Fox & Rabbit at Lockton, out on the A169 at the edge of Dalby Forest, serves Whitby haddock with homemade chips, mushy peas and tartare sauce, a venison burger with red-onion marmalade and Yorkshire blue cheese, homemade steak-and-ale pie, and pan-fried lamb's liver with parsley mash, bacon and red-onion gravy. Charles and Toby Wood have run it since 2004, with David Owuor in the kitchen for more than a decade.

Planning the Last Mile

A car is the simplest option here; alternatives need planning. Scarborough, the nearest station, is about seven miles east, and buses barely reach the hamlet: the only scheduled service is a permit-only school run, with a timetable that has not been updated in years.