Botham's stands on Coach Road, a bakery shop that has stayed in one family for five generations. Elizabeth Botham began the business in 1865, selling bread and cakes from a basket at Whitby market, and the Sleights shop still turns out Whitby Lemon Buns, Yorkshire Brack, Plum Bread, Shah Ginger Biscuits and Chocolate Japonaise, alongside fresh loaves, cream cakes, takeaway sandwiches and hot drinks.
The same street carries most of what you need. Radford's, an award-winning family butcher run by Andrew Radford with Sarah Radford managing, sells beef, poultry, pork and lamb, plus ready meals, pies and condiments. Further down, Eskdale Fisheries does haddock and chips as a sit-in restaurant and takeaway. For a village strung along one road at the foot of a valley, that is several food businesses along Coach Road.
Coach Road runs toward the River Esk and the Esk Valley railway in the valley bottom, and the older houses along it are sandstone under red pantiles. To the south the ground rises sharply into Blue Bank, a one-in-four climb that the A169 takes on its way from Pickering to Whitby. Little Beck comes north through the wooded valley at Iburndale before joining the Esk.
The Salmon Leap Hotel sits at the near end of the road, close to the station. It keeps a log-burning stove going in winter, cooks breakfast with its own eggs — there is a resident cockerel — and its beer garden looks out on the summer steam trains passing through. It was once called the Station Hotel, which the location still explains.
The Plough Inn, an early-nineteenth-century sandstone pub with sash windows and a pantile roof, is advertised for sale with vacant possession; current trading status is unclear, so check before visiting. Its terraced rear garden looks over the Esk Valley.
Sleights station is in the village, on the Esk Valley line between Middlesbrough and Whitby. It is unstaffed — a single step-free platform and a shelter, no toilets. Buses 95 and 96 run to Whitby, Ruswarp, Grosmont and on up the dale, and the Coastliner 840 stops here for Goathland, Pickering and Malton. Whitby itself, with its clifftop abbey ruins, is three miles off.
The Sleights Village Trail leaves from the Coach Road car park and links the old pump, the hall, the church and the river footbridge before crossing to Briggswath. The waymarked Esk Valley Walk passes through on its thirty-seven-mile line from Castleton to Whitby; the Grosmont-to-Whitby stage is eight miles, and the railway makes it easy to walk one way and ride back. If you want a climb rather than a valley amble, the path up to Aislaby takes about forty minutes and is uphill the whole way.
The Church of St John the Evangelist went up in 1894–95 to a design by Ewan Christian, replacing a Georgian church of 1767 that had stood on the same spot. It is built of Grosmont sandstone, with stained glass by Charles Eamer Kempe and a hammerbeam roof; the old sundial set into the boundary wall was saved from the church that came before.
The valley worked for its living long before the trains. Alum was quarried around Eskdaleside from the mid-seventeenth century until the 1830s, and the short-lived Sleights Bridge ironstone mine produced about eleven thousand tons of ore between 1856 and 1859. The cast-iron village pump of 1859 was last needed in the great flood of 1930, when the water mains failed and the river took the road bridge with it; the replacement opened in 1937.
Above the village, the grounds of Woodlands Hall, the eighteenth-century house that five Yeoman sisters once laid out and opened for charity, still soften the northern edge with trees. The pump is on the trail too, dry and passed without a second glance, until someone tells you the last time it was needed.