Levisham Station

At the Bottom of Newtondale

The clock is set into the station wall, the lamps have its name engraved on them, and the paintwork is the red-and-cream Blood and Custard livery. Levisham Station sits at the bottom of Newton Dale, a glacial meltwater valley with steep, densely wooded sides. Levisham village is a steep mile or more uphill from the platform.

You reach the station down Hardigate Road, a narrow lane shared with occasional forestry lorries. Satnav YO18 7NN brings you to the small, charged car park. The station has a grassy picnic paddock, toilets and the Weighbridge Tea Hut, serving snacks and drinks on selected weekends, bank holidays and event days. The station house, signal box and former workers' cottages complete the ensemble, restored to the place's appearance around 1912.

Railway Life and a Climb for Lunch

There is no conventional village street at the station. Woodland, the narrow road and passing trains set the scene: the North Yorkshire Moors Railway runs heritage trains, some steam-hauled, for twenty-four miles between Pickering, Goathland, Grosmont and Whitby, with Levisham among its stops.

For food, climb to Levisham village and The Horseshoe Inn. Brothers Charles and Toby Wood have run the inn since 2007, with one hosting and one cooking. Mains include Radford's sausage and mash with onion gravy, deep-fried Whitby haddock with homemade chips and mushy peas, chicken breast wrapped in bacon with creamed leeks and new potatoes, and butternut-squash, leek and pine-nut risotto. Theakston's Best Bitter and Timothy Taylor's Boltmaker are hand-pulled, and children and dogs are welcome.

Food Above the Dale and Paths Through It

Charles and Toby Wood also run the Fox & Rabbit at Lockton on the A169, two and a half miles from the station. David Owuor has led its kitchen for more than a decade — a venison burger with red-onion marmalade and Yorkshire blue, homemade steak-and-ale pie, pan-fried lamb's liver with parsley mash — and the bar keeps Wainwright Gold, Hobgoblin Stout and Old Peculier alongside Boltmaker. The Coastliner 840 stops outside the pub on the road above the dale.

The walking starts at the car park. A six-mile circuit through Newtondale mixes easy valley tracks with steep, rocky climbs through the trees, past Kale Pot Hole Farm and Raper's Farm Picnic Place, with railway whistles carrying up through the wood. A shorter route of four and a half miles links the station, the village and Skelton's Tower, a part-ruined early-nineteenth-century shooting lodge on Corn Hill Point that looks straight down onto the line. Farther north, the Hole of Horcum is a natural amphitheatre four hundred feet deep and more than half a mile wide, with a Coastliner 840 stop on the A169. Dalby Forest covers more than eight thousand acres and has cycle hire, play areas and a Gruffalo orienteering trail.

Rails, Camping Coaches and Leuecen

The Whitby and Pickering Railway reached the valley in 1836. Local tradition says the Reverend Robert Skelton agreed to the station's site because it was convenient for his valley house, far below the village. Converted Great Northern six-wheel camping coaches arrived in 1933, sleeping six for two pounds and ten shillings a week in high season. The line closed in 1965, and volunteers reopened the Pickering–Grosmont section in the 1970s.

The Domesday form of the name is Leuecen: the farmstead of Leofgeat's people. The settlement is estimated at about 1.4 households, among the smallest 20 per cent of recorded settlements.

St Mary by Levisham Beck

St Mary's church stands alone between Lockton and Levisham, down by the beck. Its chancel dates to the eleventh century, and local tradition links the church's isolation to the medieval village's disappearance during the Black Death. A sword-incised slab in the ruined chancel may mark Ralph de Bolbeck, a thirteenth-century lord who held land in both Lockton and Levisham. The graveyard remains in use, and an outdoor service is held there each July.