Levisham

Brothers at the Horseshoe

The Horseshoe Inn sits at the north end of Main Street, run since 2007 by two brothers, Charles and Toby Wood, one working the front of house and the other in the kitchen. They came here after doing the same at the Fox & Rabbit at Lockton, which is still theirs, about two miles away. The Horseshoe describes itself first as a place to have a sandwich and a beer, which undersells the food a little.

The menu leans on the coast and the moor around it: a Whitby crab and smoked-salmon terrine, grilled black pudding wrapped in bacon, deep-fried Whitby haddock with homemade chips and mushy peas, Radford's sausage and mash, and, for those avoiding the fish, a butternut squash, leek and pine-nut risotto or a mushroom stroganoff. The bar keeps Theakston's Best Bitter and Timothy Taylor's Boltmaker on hand pull, alongside lagers and cider. Children and dogs are welcome.

A Village Written in Green and Stone

Levisham is a planned linear village, and it still reads as one. A long, wide green runs down the middle, with Main Street and Back Lane on either side and the old tofts and crofts stretching back behind the farmsteads towards the outlines of medieval strip fields. The larger courtyard farms were mostly rebuilt from the late eighteenth century. More than ten farms once worked here, most of them raising sheep. One is left.

Just west of the Horseshoe is the pinfold, a small stone enclosure that was used to impound stray animals. The village hall stands centrally on Main Street and can be hired.

Two Churches and a Lost Settlement

There are two churches, and they tell the same story from opposite ends. St John the Baptist, up in the village, is late nineteenth century and began as a chapel of ease. It holds the font carried up from the older church below, a carved Dragon Stone, and a scattering of small mice cut into the woodwork by Robert Thompson of Kilburn; the church invites visitors to hunt for them.

The older church, St Mary, sits alone in the valley between Levisham and Lockton, reached on foot. Its chancel is eleventh century, with an original lancet, an eleventh-century chancel arch and pieces of carved pre-Conquest stone built into the walls. Worship stopped in the 1950s, though burials continue. The village is said to have drained away during the Black Death, leaving the church stranded; Historic England calls it "a remarkable survival of the medieval village of Levisham." The Domesday surveyors recorded the place as Leuecen, Leofgeat's homestead, and reckoned it among the smallest fifth of settlements recorded.

Moorland Paths and the Railway Below

Walking is a major reason people come. From the A169 above the village, the Hole of Horcum opens out — a natural amphitheatre around four hundred feet deep and more than half a mile across, with an accessible viewing platform a short walk from the car park. A five-mile circuit crosses Levisham Moor past Bronze Age barrows and the ruins of a medieval grange, with the option of dropping down to Skelton's Tower, a square sandstone shooting lodge built for the Reverend Robert Skelton and left to fall quietly to bits above the railway in Newtondale.

That railway is Levisham's own. The station sits about a mile and a half below the village on the North Yorkshire Moors heritage line, restored to how it looked in 1912, with toilets, a picnic paddock and a tea hut that opens on some weekends. The walk down is downhill; the walk back up is a steep climb. Levisham is otherwise about two miles off the A169 and seven north of Pickering, with no ordinary bus into the village itself.

Check the Trains Before You Go

On operating days, check the timetable for trains passing the picnic paddock; steam working is not guaranteed.