Set into the parapet of the main road bridge over the River Seven is a sundial dated 1769. You can walk up and read it, which is more than can be said for most things that old. A little way off sits a second, far smaller bridge, the Green Bridge, built around the same time to carry packhorses over floodwater on a raised causeway. After the flood channel silted up, the Green Bridge now spans a dry ditch.
The village runs mainly in a line, then loosens and spreads west around the school. The River Seven, broad grassed greens and mature trees hold the middle of it together, and the buildings face in whatever direction suited them when they were put up, so the rooflines never quite agree with each other. Sandstone, limestone, brick, slate and pantile all turn up within a few hundred yards. There are around 280 people here, a village hall, a 19th-century chapel and one pub.
That pub is the Fox and Hounds, an 18th-century coaching inn that keeps rooms and describes itself as romantic. What matters on a wet afternoon is the layout: a restaurant, a lounge bar and a separate dog-friendly bar, with a double-sided log burner set between the two bars. It is called Big Bertha. The kitchen changes its menu often, so nothing is promised, but recent mains have included pan-fried king scallops with crab bisque and pickled apple, a duck spring roll with hoisin yoghurt and cucumber slaw, a T-bone pork chop with paprika-maple glaze, monkfish and king-prawn coconut curry, and local beef fillet with beef-dripping chips. The food carries AA Rosette recognition. The building is Grade II listed, with a mounting block still standing beside one of the doors.
For everyday shopping, Pickering and Kirkbymoorside sit either side of you on the A170.
All Saints' Church stands at the north-eastern end of the village with a 12th-century nave and chancel and a timber-and-shingle bellcote added during a 1904 restoration. The Norman doorways survive, and above the south one is a weathered carving that may show Samson and the lion, though it has worn past certainty. Inside are 17th-century pews with acorn knobs on their carved ends, turned altar rails and a painted hatchment. The rubble walls have swallowed older stone as they went up, and a hogback tomb fragment and several cross-heads are built into the fabric, evidence used to argue that a pre-Conquest church may have stood here.
Beside it is the Old Hall, both a Scheduled Monument and Grade I listed: a roofed 12th-century great hall, probably built by Guisborough Priory after 1168. Matilda of York paid for its partitions and flooring when it served as a chapel in 1431–32, and it later came down in the world to a rectory, then a barn, then stables. Down by the water, Sinnington Grange Mill, dated 1844, keeps its iron waterwheel and two of its original bedstones. It ground corn until 1978.
The best walk out of here is a seven-mile circular from the green, climbing about 700 feet up to Appleton-le-Moors and back by Lower Askew, with the heather moors beyond Lastingham in the distance for part of it. The nearest trains are at Malton, roughly nine miles south.
Every May Day, the maypole on the green is used for the Mayfair's traditional dancing.