Mickleby

The White Hart's own rhythm

In a side room of the White Hart, Bob Montgomery keeps a coal fire burning for the folk club that meets there. The rest of the pub has the oak beams and open fire you would expect of a building reckoned to be more than two hundred years old, but the side room is its own concern. The folk duo Na-Mara call it "a cosy side room in the pub for a good singsong on a Saturday night." Bob and Hazel Montgomery run the place, and they have kept it deliberately plain: no loud music, no slot machine, no pool table.

What it does have is quoits, the game the White Hart is best known for, played on summer evenings, alongside darts, dominoes, charity quizzes and bingo. In warm weather the drinking moves out to a courtyard and beer garden hung with baskets, and dogs are welcome. The kitchen keeps mostly to light snacks rather than a full menu, so this is a pub to drink and talk in rather than book a table at.

A working-farm village

Mickleby is a working-farm village and does not pretend otherwise. Farms stand at either end of a single line of houses built from local sandstone under red-clay pantiles, set back behind gardens, drystone walls and hedges. The National Park calls its character "distinctively agricultural." The village sits on a hilltop above Mickleby Beck, at the head of one of the valleys that run down towards Sandsend, west of Lythe.

The old core groups the White Hart with two chapels, Methodist and Congregational. Near them stands a former manse from the 1920s, the only brick building in the village, which the National Park describes as having an unusual "railway character." Northfields Farmhouse, Grade II listed and brick-built in the mid-to-late eighteenth century, possibly with an older core, still keeps its old kitchen beams, plank cupboards on L-hinges, a dairy and two staircases.

Supplies and paths to the coast

For a shop you go to Lythe, where a volunteer-run community shop takes in a café and a Post Office. It sells everyday essentials and local produce, bakes its own cakes, makes sandwiches, and has a tea garden round the back.

The walking is why many people come. A 9.7-mile circuit from Lythe follows the Cleveland Way towards Runswick Bay before turning inland through Mickleby and back by way of West and East Barnby, with the coast and the Boulby cliffs in view for much of it. A shorter route links the village with Ugthorpe and its restored pinfold. If you want the sea without the distance, the two-mile clifftop path at Runswick Bay is level enough for most.

Bays, villages and connections

Runswick Bay itself is about a mile away, a sandy beach with rockpools, fossils, fishermen's cottages and the only thatched house left on the Yorkshire coast. Staithes, with its cobbled lanes and its story of the young James Cook working there as an apprentice shopkeeper, sits a little further along the coast, and Whitby Abbey stands beyond that.

There is no station in the village; the nearest is Lealholm on the Esk Valley line, unstaffed and without a car park. The A174 runs just to the north, and the Arriva X4 stops on the B1266 at the edge of the village rather than its centre. A car is generally the simplest way in.

The large farmstead

The Domesday surveyors wrote the place down as Michelbi, the large farmstead, and recorded not a single household. The farms at both ends of the village are still worked today.