The skewers in Scawton's restaurant were forged from horseshoes. A local blacksmith, Ollie Fulford, made them from the old shoes of Laurissa Heywood's horse, along with the new sign and the dining-room table legs. Laurissa and her husband Tom run Pignut & The Hare, which occupies the village's former pub, the Hare Inn. They bought it in 2025 from Paul and Liz Jackson, who had spent years restoring a neglected inn brick by brick, and opened their own place there on 1 August 2025. Tom had once telephoned the Jacksons asking for a job and been turned down because there was none going.
It is now an 18-cover tasting-menu restaurant, and a major reason to visit Scawton. The menu changes often. Recent courses have included trout tartare with fig-leaf emulsion, charcoal-grilled pork belly with a sticky barbecue glaze and brown-butter hollandaise, and mushroom ice cream served with a mushroom-and-coffee crumb and caramel. It opens with "Wastage" snacks made from offcuts, such as a mini gazpacho or a choux bun flavoured with spent coffee grounds, and ends with a butterfly bun brought out in a cake tin, in memory of Tom's grandmother.
The restaurant names several nearby suppliers. The mushrooms come from Luke Joseph at Moorside Mushrooms in Fadmoor; organic vegetables from John and Rachel Patterson at Newfields Organic; Mangalitza pork from Lisa Hodgson at Otterburn Farm; poultry from Herb-Fed of Easingwold; herbs and edible flowers from Helmsley Walled Garden. Beef and more pork come from the Fargher family's stock at Castle Howard.
There is no shop in Scawton, and no direct bus stop in the village. The nearest station is Thirsk, about fourteen kilometres away, and a milepost on the A170 to the south puts Helmsley at five miles and Thirsk at nine. You will want a car.
The other notable building is the Church of St Mary, which monks from Old Byland put up as a chapel around the middle of the twelfth century for Hugh de Malebys, a steward to the Mowbrays. It is Grade I. The south porch shelters a round-headed doorway carved with two orders of zigzag, colonnettes and scalloped capitals; inside are a pointed sedile, a piscina, former altar niches later cut through into squints, and a round font, possibly Norman, under a tall octagonal wooden cover from the seventeenth century. Hodgson Fowler restored it in 1892 with enough tact that Pevsner wrote: "A bouquet is due to Hodgson Fowler, who, in 1892, restored the church so tactfully that it now appears as genuine as one can find medieval village churches."
The Domesday surveyors listed Scawton under two owners, entered no population, and marked both holdings as waste. West of Church Farm, grassed-over earthworks mark a medieval hall about nine metres by twenty, set above Brignal Gill, which drops away more than forty metres and provided the site's natural defence.
The walking runs to the two great ruins nearby. St Mary's is the sixth stop on St Aelred's Pilgrim Trail, a forty-one-mile route linking churches across Upper Ryedale to Rievaulx Abbey. An eleven-mile walk follows the old road between Byland and Rievaulx through sheep country, and a seven-mile circuit climbs 160 metres past viewpoints over the abbey and the River Rye. On 14 October 1322 that quiet ground saw the Battle of Old Byland, when Robert the Bruce's men outflanked the English on the Hambleton Hills and Edward II fled Rievaulx immediately, abandoning the royal treasure.
For children, nearby Sutton Bank National Park Centre keeps an adventure playground of treehouses, a stone castle and roundhouses, a sandpit and a mud kitchen. From the escarpment there you look out over the Vale of Mowbray, the view James Herriot called the finest in England.
The village hall is a shed of corrugated iron, a piece of village character rather than a visitor attraction.