Scawton

Horseshoes and Tasting Menus

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 an 18-cover tasting-menu restaurant and a major reason to visit Scawton. The menu changes regularly. In January 2026, dishes included “Wastage” snacks made from offcuts, trout tartare with fig-leaf emulsion, charcoal-grilled pork belly with barbecue glaze and brown-butter hollandaise, and mushroom ice cream with a mushroom-and-coffee crumb and caramel. A butterfly bun served in a cake tin paid tribute to the chef's grandmother. The menu names principal ingredients while leaving each dish's preparation and garnishes as a surprise.

A Local Larder, a Car Required

Nearby suppliers provide mushrooms 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; and herbs and edible flowers from Helmsley Walled Garden. Castle Howard supplies beef and pork; the Fargher family raises the Aberdeen Angus beef on the estate.

The 259R passes through Scawton as a permits-only school service. A milepost on the A170 south of the village records Helmsley at five miles and Thirsk at nine; those are distances from the post, not the village. Bring any provisions you need and plan around a car or pre-arranged taxi.

Romanesque Stone and a Vanished Manor

Monks from Old Byland built the Church of St Mary as a chapel around the middle of the twelfth century for Hugh de Malebys, a steward to the Mowbrays. Now Grade I listed, it has a round-headed south 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, beneath a tall seventeenth-century octagonal wooden cover. Hodgson Fowler restored the church in 1892 so sensitively that Nikolaus Pevsner later praised its authentic medieval character.

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.

Abbey Roads and Escarpment Play

On 14 October 1322, Robert the Bruce's men outflanked the English on the Hambleton Hills at the Battle of Old Byland. Edward II, dining at Rievaulx Abbey, fled after news of the defeat arrived and abandoned the royal treasure. The forty-one-mile St Aelred's Pilgrim Trail links churches across Upper Ryedale and Helmsley with that abbey; Scawton's church is stop six. An eleven-mile circular walk from Scawton follows the old route between Byland Abbey and the River Rye valley through sheep country, then returns via Nettle Dale.

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.

Corrugated-Iron Village Character

The village hall is a shed of corrugated iron, a piece of village character rather than a visitor attraction.