Lealholm

The River Crossing and the Village

The stepping stones cross the River Esk in a line below Crunkly Ghyll, where children have long worked out which of the flat stones is loose. The National Park recommends the game and the Esk Valley Railway reckons the stones have entertained generations of children, though the river decides whether it is a good idea on any given day. Judge that yourself before you let anyone halfway across.

The village gathers around the crossing: a green, a seventeenth-century bridge, riverside buildings, and valley sides that climb towards heather moorland. Lealholm means the settlement by the willow trees. People crossed at this point for centuries, by ford and then by bridge, and a corn mill worked here from the fourteenth century until just after the Second World War.

Riverside Food and Drink

The Board Inn stands beside the Esk, about two hundred metres from the railway station. It is an eighteenth-century inn run by John Davis and Adele Wattam; Davis kept the Craven Heifer at Skipton for sixteen years before this, and the Maypole Inn at Long Preston. The food is home-cooked and the menu changes daily — cottage pie with seasonal vegetables, smoked-salmon pasta, Yorkshire ham and eggs, Whitby breaded scampi, and homemade puddings. Recent visitors have come away happy with the steak-and-ale pie and the chicken pie. Three Yorkshire cask beers rotate on the bar, none of them permanent. There is a real fire, a riverside patio, dogs are welcome, and the local CAMRA branch has named it both Cider Pub and Community Pub of the Year. Five rooms upstairs if you want to stay by the water.

For lunch there is the Beck View Tea Room, whose terrace looks over a small waterfall on the beck and across to the Esk. Gareth and Sally serve sandwiches of ham flash-roasted for eight hours and mature cheddar, on bread from Stonehouse Bakery in Danby; Gareth bakes the cakes and scones. The village shop carries a wide grocery range, is known locally for its fresh fruit and vegetables, stocks goods from local suppliers, and will order in what it does not have. There is a post office, a free car park and public toilets.

Esk Valley Walking and St James

Walking is the best reason to come. Lealholm sits on the Esk Valley Walk, the thirty-seven-mile waymarked route from Castleton to Whitby that follows the river from its moorland source to the North Sea. The section from here to Grosmont runs five and three-quarter miles, about three hours, station to station along riverside and woodland paths through Glaisdale and Egton Bridge, past Beggar's Bridge and more stepping stones. It is mostly easy going, with gates, one stile, and a stone trod that turns slippery after rain.

The church of St James the Greater was built in 1902 by Temple Moore in sandstone, with a slim battlemented west tower, lancet windows, an exposed-stone interior under a ribbed barrelled timber roof, an oak pulpit and a carved marble reredos. It is a young building for a place this old. The Domesday surveyors found Lealholm held by Hugh son of Baldric, recorded no population at all, and valued one holding at three pounds before the Conquest and three shillings after it; both entries suggest the land had been laid waste.

Fountains, Floods and Remembrance

Smaller marks record the years. Sir Francis Ley gave the village its drinking fountains in 1904, each carrying his intertwined F-and-L monogram. On the wall of the Wesleyan chapel are the flood lines of 1840 and 1930, the July 1930 mark standing a foot above the older one. In a field below Lealholmside a stone remembers two American airmen, Major Donald Lee Schuyler and Lieutenant Thomas Doyle Wheeler, whose reconnaissance Phantom came down there at 09:40 on 27 April 1979.

Arriving in Lealholm

Trains run through the village on Northern's Esk Valley line between Middlesbrough and Whitby, which is about eight miles off, and the 96 bus reaches it too. The Sunday Times once called Lealholm the prettiest village in Yorkshire. On the right afternoon the tea room is open, the fountains are running, and someone is out on the stones deciding whether to risk the next one.