Sawdon

A Street Across the Park Line

Main Street in Sawdon runs along a line that most villages never have to think about. The houses on its north-east side stand inside the North York Moors National Park; the ones opposite do not. You simply walk down a single village street with a national park beginning halfway across it.

The street itself is the plainest kind of Yorkshire. Buildings face the pavement directly, without front gardens, their limestone and sandstone walls capped with red pantiles and brick chimneys. Between them run stone boundary walls, five-bar gates and wide grass verges, with working farms still set among the houses. Two of those houses break the pattern: Grove Farmhouse and Dale View, both listed, both built partly in brick — red and cream on Grove Farmhouse, over a sandstone plinth — in a village where nearly everything else is stone. Brentwood, a late-eighteenth-century sandstone house, keeps its herringbone-tooled quoins and tripartite sash windows.

The Smithy Without a Pub

The building most people came for is the Anvil Inn, and it is shut. It began life as a smithy, working from the early eighteenth century until 1985, and when it became a pub it kept the furnace, the anvil and the bellows in the bar. It reopened in October 2021 after a two-year gap, then closed again in September 2024, and its future is unsettled. If you are coming to Sawdon, come knowing there is no pub to walk to for now. The nearest counter is a weekly Post Office session held in the village hall over at Brompton-by-Sawdon.

Brompton's Church and Older Record

Brompton is where the parish keeps its church. All Saints is a Grade I building with a fourteenth-century tower and nave, twelfth-century scalloped capitals reset in the wall, a studded and traceried south door and a painted organ case by Temple Moore. William Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson here on 4 October 1802. Brompton also holds the older records: Sawdon has no separate Domesday entry, though one of Brompton's own holdings was valued at a pound in 1086, with a mill worth five shillings and eight acres of meadow.

Tracks from Forest to Coast

Sawdon sits on the northern edge of the Vale of Pickering, beside Sawdon Dale and the edge of Wykeham Forest, which makes it a starting point for walking more than anything else. One route, a six-mile line of quiet roads and forest tracks, runs from near Hackness through Wrench Green and Wykeham Forest into the village, climbing about six hundred feet along the way. A few miles off, Dalby Forest covers 8,500 acres with graded cycle trails, a Go Ape, sculpture and a Dark Sky Discovery Site. Scarborough and its harbour are eight miles east; Pickering, with the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, lies west along the A170, which passes through Brompton — the East Yorkshire 28 bus runs there too, not into Sawdon itself. The nearest working station is Seamer.

Station and Chapel Afterlives

Sawdon once had its own station, opened in 1882 and closed to passengers in 1950, though it actually stood down at Brompton and took the Sawdon name only to avoid confusion with another Brompton near Northallerton. There was a Wesleyan chapel too, built on Main Street in 1823. It is a private house now, and you would pass it without knowing.