Nether Silton

Postboxes, Stone and the Village Green

The Old Post Office keeps a Georgian post box set into its wall. A few steps away, early-nineteenth-century Forge Cottage is listed, and a red K6 telephone box stands in front of it: Giles Gilbert Scott's 1935 design for George V's Silver Jubilee, grouped so closely with the buildings around it that it is listed partly for its strong visual relationship with them.

This is the middle of Nether Silton, a linear village strung along a wide green on the south-western edge of the North York Moors. Sandstone houses under pantile and slate roofs sit back behind grass verges and mature trees. The ground slopes enough that the approaches open long southward views over farmland to the Brenk, Mill, Leake, Rush and Beanlands hills, with glimpses of moorland to the east. The character is still plainly agricultural.

A Community Pub at the Start of the Trails

The one place to eat and drink is the Gold Cup Inn, which serves Nether Silton, Over Silton and Kepwick and is the only meeting place here outside the churches. Since December 2025 it has been run by volunteers while a community benefit society is set up, and it is community-owned, with a share offer open to anyone who wants a stake in it. There is a log fire, a beer garden, and a bar whose favourites include Guinness, Wainwrights and Boddingtons; dogs are welcome. Food comes and goes with events rather than a fixed menu, so check what is on before you plan a meal around it. There is no shop; plan provisions ahead.

The walking is the reason most people come. For longer days there are two moderate circuits of around eight miles. One climbs Atlay Bank onto the Hambleton Drove Road, an old track with views across the Vale of Mowbray to the Pennines, then drops back through Silton Forest and follows the trackbed of a horse-drawn railway that Joshua Crompton built in 1833 to carry limestone down from Kepwick Moor. A. J. Brown, walking the drove road in 1952, called it "the kind of road a walker dreams about." The other takes in Silton Forest, Black Hambleton and a stretch of the Cleveland Way, with 1,304 feet of ascent.

Ways In and Marks of History

The village sits just east of the A19; the nearest stations are at Northallerton, about six miles off, and Thirsk. There is no regular public bus service for general passengers; a school-only service is listed.

History here is quiet but odd. In the field beside All Saints — the village's own church, built in 1812, with a Norman tub font carved in cable moulding — stands a monolith cut in 1765 at the whim of Squire Hickes. Its inscription, worked entirely in initial letters, marks a manor house that had already vanished: "Here the grand old manor house stood, the black beams were oak, the great walls were good."

The Field Path to St Mary's

A shorter walk is the best of the lot. A footpath leaves beside the Old Post Office, runs along a grassed track behind the plots, and crosses fields to isolated St Mary's, over towards Over Silton. Its Norman doorway has scalloped capitals and zigzag moulding, and inside are a seventeenth-century font and eighteenth-century royal arms. The church has no electricity. It is always open, and when the light goes it is lit by candles.