Over Silton

Sandstone below the wooded hills

A Victorian post box is set into a wall in Over Silton, cast-iron and wall-mounted. The rest is sandstone: farmsteads and cottages set behind cobbles, grass verges and low stone walls, with long ranges of outbuildings, slate and pantile roofs and sash windows. The village runs mostly in a line along the western edge of the North York Moors, worn paths threading between the houses.

Behind and above the cottages the ground climbs into wooded hills. These were once quarries and limekilns, and the present footpaths are the tracks that led out to them. Traces of old orchards remain, along with landscaped gardens and mature trees that tie the village visually to the trees on the slopes.

Arrive prepared, then find the pub

There is no shop and no bus. Visitors bring what they need and drive in, by Cart Riggin off the A19. Northallerton station is about five and a half miles off, with a taxi rank outside; Thirsk is roughly nine miles south, and its market has run in the Market Place since 1145, selling seasonal fruit and vegetables, locally reared meat, artisan bread, chutney, plants, crafts and vintage books.

The nearest pub is the Gold Cup, a short walk over in Nether Silton. It is run by volunteers as a community pub, with a log fire, a beer garden and no objection to dogs. Theakston Best Bitter is the regular, alongside two changing local casks and a bar that also keeps Guinness, Wainwright and Boddingtons. It took on new landlords in the summer of 2025.

Across the field to St Mary's

A historic public footpath links Nether Silton and Over Silton by way of the church, passing behind the Old Post Office. The church, St Mary's, stands about half a mile from Over Silton in a hollow of its own, roughly halfway between the two villages. You reach it on foot across a field. Wear boots: the ground can be muddy, and there is a gate for cattle.

It is worth the field. St Mary's is Grade II* and has fabric from the twelfth, fourteenth, fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. The south doorway is Norman, with scalloped capitals and zigzag-and-roll moulding, and the original twelfth-century plank door still hangs inside it. There is a bellcote, probably fifteenth-century, a seventeenth-century font, carved crests on the king-post roof trusses and eighteenth-century royal arms. The building has no electricity, so services on dark days are held by candle. It is kept open for visitors, and in spring the ground shows wild daffodils. The National Park calls the setting "tranquil and contemplative".

Benchmarks and the hob in the crags

From the church you can pick up the Bench Mark Challenge, a 4.6-mile circular that hunts out Ordnance Survey benchmarks, passing an old kiln on Moor Lane and the bridge over Sorrow Beck, with around 164 metres of climbing.

By the lay subsidy of 1301 there were eight households here. In a wooded crag north-west of the village is Hobthrush Hall, a small cave once said to hold a friendly goblin. William Grainge wrote in 1859 that the hob churned cream at night for the innkeeper Weighall in return for bread and butter, and vanished when the reward was forgotten.

Longer days beyond the Siltons

Further afield are Mount Grace Priory, with its Arts and Crafts house, gardens and tearoom near the A19, and Sutton Bank, where the National Park centre gives children treehouses, a stone castle, roundhouses, a sandpit and a mud kitchen. Thirsk holds the market and the World of James Herriot, in the house that was Alf Wight's home and surgery. But the village itself is quieter than any of these, and the door of St Mary's is left open on the chance that someone will walk up the field.