Rosedale Abbey

Two inns in a moorland valley

At the Coach House Inn on Alder Carr Lane, the black-pudding fritters come from Doreen's of Yorkshire and arrive with Rosedale apple-and-chilli jam. The rest of the menu keeps that company: a "Desperate Dan" steak pie, beef carbonnade cooked in Theakston Old Peculier, herb-crusted haddock under lime-and-chilli butter, Thai fishcakes, a sweet-potato-and-spinach curry. Theakston Best Bitter is the regular cask; the changing beers come from Helmsley, Jolly Sailor and Rudgate. Dogs are allowed in the bar. York CAMRA named it Town & Country Pub of the Season in 2019, and it runs quiz nights, pie nights and coffee mornings for local causes alongside a real fire and a garden.

The pub sits in the bottom of a broad U-shaped valley on the River Seven, with moorland rimming both sides and steep roads climbing out. Approaching from the south, you get the whole shape of it at once, a patchwork of fields under the heather.

Higher up, the White Horse Farm Inn looks down the dale from the hillside, with exposed beams, a log fire and a terrace built for the view. Black Sheep Best Bitter is the regular here, with two changing ales beside it, and the inn keeps dog treats behind the bar.

Makers, golf and the priory church

For daytime there is Graze on the Green, which does homemade cakes, sandwiches and locally roasted coffee, with seating indoors and out. Back on Alder Carr Lane, Rosedale Goats Cheese sells its own Rosedale, Bell End Blue and Hanging Stone cheeses, plus raw goat milk and whey. Stephen Gillies and Kate Jones have been making engraved glass vessels and bowls in the village since 1995, and their work is held at the V&A. There is a nine-hole golf course, and public toilets in the village.

The Church of St Mary and St Laurence went up in 1839 to a design by Lewis Vulliamy, on the foundations of the medieval priory chapel it replaced. One fourteenth-century window was kept. Near the altar, a memorial tablet shows a cross and the half-legible name MARIA, and an old stone seat from the priory now serves as the bishop's chair.

From medieval priory to ironstone boom

The "Abbey" is a misnomer. The medieval house here was a small nunnery, founded before 1158 under the patronage of William of Rosedale and dissolved in 1536 with eight nuns and a prioress; the place-name most likely comes from a Viking word for horse rather than anything ecclesiastical. Only a single stone turret survives above ground, standing in the churchyard.

Ironstone mining transformed the dale from 1855 to 1926. Mining began on the east side in 1860, in seams up to fourteen feet thick, and by the time it closed in 1926 around eleven million tonnes of ironstone had been taken out. A fourteen-mile railway carried the processed ore off the moor, the population rose to nearly three thousand, and the calcining kilns, a moorland chimney and rows of ruined cottages are still up there.

Railway ruins and the chain breaker

Those ruins are the reason to walk. A 7.5-mile circular from the green runs through valley farmland and the hamlet of Thorgill, then returns along the old mineral railway past the roasting kilns, which you are asked not to climb into. For something flatter, an accessible route beside the Bank Top kilns keeps to the high railway trackbed and its views. Further north, through Northdale, Andy Goldsworthy's Hanging Stones links nine rebuilt farm buildings and one new building across six miles, the walking between them being part of the work.

The road out of the south side is Chimney Bank, signed at 33% and best treated cautiously in poor conditions. In 1987 it hosted the National Hill Climb Championship, where the local rider Paul Curran beat a young Chris Boardman into second. Cyclists call it the chain breaker.

Reaching a quieter dale

Getting here is a matter of minor dale roads. Pickering, the terminus of the 173 community bus on Mondays, is also the start of the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, which runs twenty-four miles through Goathland and Grosmont to Whitby; the seasonal M6 bus links the village to York, Malton, Castleton and Danby through the summer.

The National Park describes what is left of the dale as "a peaceful scene filled with sounds of sheep or the lilting song of skylarks." In spring it still keeps some of the moors' best hay meadows and wild native daffodils, and the ring ouzels come back from North Africa to nest among the heather and the old mine workings.