Lockton Tea Rooms & Gallery serves a breakfast it calls the Lockton Loaded, alongside Yorkshire rarebit made with three Yorkshire cheeses, Turkish eggs, a Reuben, a mushroom melt, a barbecue pulled-pork toastie, and fruit and cheese scones. The gallery on the walls shows work by the Lockton Artists, nine members working in painting, photography, textiles, ceramics, jesmonite and metalwork. There are fewer than 175 permanent residents here, which makes nine practising artists a reasonable proportion of the village. Dogs get their own order: a pup plate of sausage bites and biscuits.
The village itself is limestone, just off the A169, running roughly parallel to the steep-sided, wooded valley of Levisham Beck. The road rises and falls as it curves through, and beyond the houses are Dalby Forest, pasture, glacial channels and open moor.
The Fox & Rabbit Inn sits directly on the A169, at the edge of Dalby Forest rather than in the village core. Brothers Charles and Toby Wood have run it since 2004, and David Owuor has led the kitchen for more than a decade. The menu runs to Whitby haddock with homemade chips and mushy peas, a venison burger with red-onion marmalade and Yorkshire blue cheese, steak-and-ale pie, lamb's liver with parsley mash, bacon and red-onion gravy, Whitby scampi, and a wild-mushroom and spinach risotto. The hand-pulls include Timothy Taylor's Boltmaker, Wainwright Gold, Theakston Best Bitter and Old Peculier.
The building started life as Keld House, named for a Scarborough surgeon, Thomas Keld. It was advertised to let in 1788 as well placed for an inn, and began as a beer house.
St Giles's church is Grade II* and was for a long time listed under the name St Mary. The nave and chancel are 13th-century, the tower 15th. Inside are a 13th-century tub font, a finely carved late-17th-century octagonal pulpit, 17th-century altar rails, and east-window glass of 1925; the 1809 porch door still hangs on a strap hinge. The medieval saddleback roof is formed as a ribbed tunnel vault beneath interlocking stone flags. The building is on Historic England's at-risk register, its condition assessed as poor, decaying slowly with no solution yet agreed.
The best walking starts a few miles north at Saltergate, where an eight-kilometre circuit takes about three hours across Levisham Moor, dropping through the rocky cleft of Dundale Griff and returning through the Hole of Horcum. The Hole is a natural amphitheatre roughly 400 feet deep and more than half a mile across; the tidier explanation is spring-sapping, though the local one has the giant Wade scooping out the earth by hand. Adding the diversion to Skelton Tower makes it eleven kilometres. The moor holds Bronze Age barrows, Iron Age boundary dykes, and the traces of a medieval monastic sheep farm.
Levisham station, in its own steep wooded valley, is the nearest railway stop, though it is a heritage halt on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway rather than an everyday connection. For ordinary trains, Malton is the interchange, with the 840 bus linking through, so it is worth checking times before you go. Lockton and Levisham face each other across the gorge; the footpath down to the station is a little over two miles, hilly and largely off the road.
Behind the cemetery, residents have planted a community orchard of apple, plum and pear, with wildflowers sown among the trees; the native hedging is still to go in, part of a quiet biodiversity plan for the space.