Behind the Black Swan, two acres of growing beds and terraces climb the slope, and a good deal of what you eat here started life in that ground. Tommy Banks builds his tasting menus around what the family farm and the garden give up through the seasons, supplemented by foraging in the woods and hedges around the village. A sample menu runs to game broth, Dexter beef with gherkin and soured cream, Chevin goat with fermented onion and walnut, lion's mane with guanciale and chive, fallow with artichoke and plum, then yoghurt with Douglas fir and raw milk with elderflower to finish. "It might be something outwardly simple but really fresh and delicious," Banks has said of the approach.
The pub itself is a Grade II-listed sixteenth-century building with a restaurant on the first floor, reached by uneven stairs, and nine rooms above. It holds a Michelin star, a Michelin Green Star and four AA rosettes. Dogs are not allowed inside except service animals, and there is no accessible toilet, so it is worth knowing the shape of the place before you commit to the climb. Some of the Oldstead produce travels beyond the plate: Made in Oldstead sends out seasonal food boxes built from the same garden, orchard and polytunnel, though there is no shop counter to walk into.
The village sits below the Hambleton Hills escarpment, on the southern edge of the North York Moors, where wooded limestone crags and rounded knolls give way to long views over the Vale of York. It is small and set among pasture.
The circuit worth planning a day around starts a mile off at Byland Abbey and runs seven miles, about four hours, on signed field paths and forest tracks. It climbs through pasture and Snever Wood, with a short diversion to Mount Snever Observatory, a belvedere that banker John Wormald put up in 1837 to mark Victoria's accession and that now stands inaccessible and hemmed in by trees. The inscription above its door reads, in part, "See rich industry smiling on the plains / And peace and plenty tell Victoria reigns." From there the path joins the old Hambleton Drove Road into Oldstead, then returns past Oldstead Grange and the streams of the monastic fishponds, with the rose window of Byland Abbey in view. Near Cockerdale you may see Exmoor ponies.
On a hill above the village stands a small memorial chapel that the sculptor John Bunting raised in 1957 from a disused farmstead, using the farm's own stone. He made three stained-glass windows for it, set two angels outside and laid a recumbent paratrooper within. It remembers three of his Ampleforth schoolfellows killed in the Second World War: Hugh Dormer, Michael Fenwick and Michael Allmand, who was awarded the Victoria Cross.
The Cistercians got here first. Around 1147 the community moved west from Old Byland to this spot, then called Stocking, put up a stone church and cloister, and stayed some thirty years before settling at the permanent Byland Abbey site in 1177. In 1322 the ground above the village saw the Battle of Byland, when Robert the Bruce's Scots broke the English line defending Sutton Bank while a detachment probably slipped up a hidden gill to the high ground near Scotch Corner. Edward II fled toward Bridlington and left behind his treasure, his baggage and the Great Seal of England.
Getting here takes some thought. Thirsk station is about ten miles off and York twenty, and the village keeps no taxi of its own, so book a car ahead. Come in by Coxwold and Byland Abbey rather than trusting a sat-nav down the steep pitch of Sutton Bank.
A mile away, the Abbey Inn keeps a shorter table: Oldstead charcuterie, and a burger made with Dexter beef reared up at the Grange.