The water tower is the first thing you notice, and for a hamlet this small it is a surprising thing to have built. About ten metres tall, two storeys under a pitched roof, it looks less like utility infrastructure than a very small stone tower-house. It was raised in the early to mid-nineteenth century and kept working until around 1970. A red K6 telephone box and a post box stand beside it, and together the three make the visual centre of a place that otherwise spreads itself thin along one road.
Most of what there is to Silpho lies along that one road. Silpho sits high on a plateau north of Hackness, its buildings strung between open fields and paddocks with wide grassy verges, low dry-stone walls and mature trees between them. The gaps are as much a part of the settlement as the houses. The National Park's own planners describe it as having a "very open and remote character," which is the plain truth of standing at the top and looking out.
The older houses are sandstone under red clay pantiles, with traditional farmhouses closing off each end. The converted chapel, now a private house, uses slate, as do the later gabled semis. Before it became a home the chapel spent time as an outdoor education centre for disadvantaged children.
The building worth knowing about is Pond Cottage, an early-seventeenth-century longhouse that began with byres for animals under the same roof as the people. Its fireplace survives complete: bressumer, heck, hearth bench, and a carved witch post, a piece of North-East Yorkshire folk carving once set by the hearth for protection and now an extremely rare survival. The house is a private home and not a place to visit, but it is the reason a modest vernacular cottage is listed at all.
There's no pub or shop in Silpho these days, so the village is best treated as a quiet heritage-and-views stop paired with a walk. A local circuit leaves past Mill Farm, climbs towards Walker Flat Wood, then turns by the water tower towards Haggland Wood. A longer circular from Hackness comes up through Lowdales and drops back through Hilda Wood. Nearby Broxa Forest offers conifer tracks, a picnic area and, on summer evenings, the chance of hearing nightjars. Check the current rights-of-way notices before you set out, as one of the local bridleways has been subject to temporary closure.
For food and a pint, the nearest options are in Burniston and Cloughton. The Three Jolly Sailors at Burniston, run by Luke and Christian, does steak pie, Whitby scampi, stone-baked pizzas and burgers, with Black Sheep Best Bitter and Timothy Taylor Landlord on cask and a beer garden and dog-friendly facilities. The Blacksmith's Arms at Cloughton, a late-seventeenth-century pub on the A171, runs to homemade steak pie, haddock and chips, a Barnsley lamb chop and a sweet-potato, chickpea and spinach curry. Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip took their first pub lunch there in May 2010.
Getting here means minor moorland roads; the northern approach is signed off the A171 at Burniston. Scarborough station, about five and a half miles away, is the nearest railhead, and there's no scheduled bus to the hamlet — check timetables before you travel. On Silpho Brow, at the top of the scarp, a low prehistoric round barrow sits in the grass, eight metres across and barely knee-high, keeping the same long view the water tower keeps.