At the foot of Chimney Bank, where the road climbs at one in three toward the moor, the White Horse Farm Inn keeps its beams, its fireside corners and a real fire. Black Sheep Best Bitter is the regular ale, with two changing beers alongside it. Among the menu highlights: braised lamb shank in local-ale gravy, a double-crusted steak-and-ale pie, Yorkshire pork sausages with mash and ale gravy, haddock in beer batter, and sticky toffee pudding. Dogs are welcome and there is a garden.
A short way off, the Coach House Inn runs as the village community pub and took York CAMRA's Town and Country Pub of the Season in autumn 2019. Four beers change around a regular Theakston Best Bitter, often arriving from Helmsley, Jolly Sailor or Rudgate. The food leans on local suppliers: black-pudding fritters with Rosedale apple-and-chilli jam, a "Desperate Dan" steak pie, beef carbonnade in Theakston Old Peculier sauce, herb-crusted haddock with lime-and-chilli butter, and Coach House chicken in a garlic, herb and mushroom sauce. Dogs are allowed in the bar.
The Milburn Arms, built in 1776 as the house of the manor bailiff John Page and later the Crown Inn, is closed for the long term now, so plan on the other two.
For daytime supplies, Abbey Stores and Tea Rooms sells groceries, bakery bread, milk, maps and gifts, and does breakfasts, cream teas and light lunches; the cakes and scones are made on the premises and the bacon and sausages come from a local butcher. Graze on the Green, with seating indoors and out on the green, keeps homemade cakes, locally roasted coffee and sandwiches, and changes its menu often.
The church of St Mary and St Laurence went up in 1839 to a design by Lewis Vulliamy, on the site of a 14th-century priory chapel; one medieval window was kept and reused. Inside are pews by Thompson of Kilburn, made in 1907, a Dutch carved-oak lectern given by George Leeman, and a bishop's chair built from priory stones. In 1886 the sexton uncovered a stone coffin. A belfry in the churchyard is the last of a small Cistercian nunnery, founded before 1158 and dissolved in 1536 with a prioress and eight nuns. That belfry is why the settlement is called Rosedale Abbey, though it was never an abbey; the name Rosedale itself probably comes from a Viking word for horse rather than from roses.
The east side of the dale carries a different history, written across the hillside. From about 1860 ironstone was cut here from seams up to fourteen feet thick and roasted in calcining kilns before it went out by rail. In 1866 the East Mines shipped more than 168,000 tons; output doubled in the early 1870s and did not stop until after the 1926 General Strike, the branch line closing in June 1929. Two banks of kilns, each close to ninety metres long, still stand with mine portals, engine beds and a tall ventilation chimney, and Historic England rates the surviving complex among the best iron-mining landscapes known nationally.
A concessionary path follows the old mineral railway around the dale, level and firm along the former trackbed past the kilns. The Bank Top stretch is a Miles without Stiles route, graded For Some for its aggregate surface, with wide views over the heather moor. Further out, the Hanging Stones walk is a booking-only six miles through Northdale, linking rebuilt farm buildings into a single Andy Goldsworthy artwork.
Chimney Bank's one in three has its own following. In 1987 it hosted the National Hill Climb Championship, won by the local rider Paul Curran, who pushed Chris Boardman into second.
Getting here means minor moorland roads and, on that gradient, some care in poor weather. The nearest railway station is Castleton Moor, unstaffed and without parking; the seasonal M6 bus runs through from York by way of Pickering, and on Mondays the 173 comes up from Pickering. The nine-hole golf course is pay-and-play, its holes between seventy and a hundred and twenty yards, clubs and trolleys for hire, no membership and no dress code. Around the green there are public toilets and parking up at Bank Top, and Hutton-le-Hole with its Ryedale Folk Museum is about three miles away.
In spring the hay meadows carry native wild daffodils and the moor edge holds ring ouzels. Every August the Rosedale Show, held since 1871, brings the dale's farmers and gardeners back together, as it has for a century and a half.