Sneaton

The inn on the Whitby road

The Wilson Arms sits whitewashed on the ridge, its frontage carrying a small-pane tripartite sash and, above an altered doorway, a low-relief carving of the Wilson coat of arms. Inside there are wooden beams and log fires in winter, letting rooms upstairs, and a view down the valley towards Whitby harbour and the abbey. The kitchen cooks lamb chops with minted gravy, a gammon horseshoe with pineapple and egg, Whitby scampi, and finishes with sticky toffee pudding or a trio of Beacon Farm ice cream. The cask beer is Black Sheep Best Bitter, with one changing guest alongside it. Dogs are welcome.

This is the only confirmed pub in the village, which stands three miles from Whitby on the B1416.

Stone, patronage and power

That same coat of arms turns up again a short way off, above the porch of St Hilda's, where an inscription names James Wilson as lord of the manor. Wilson bought Sneaton Castle in 1820 and paid for the church to be rebuilt in 1823; it went up between 1823 and 1825 to designs by Will Hurst. The building is herringbone-tooled sandstone with a west tower carrying an octagonal lantern and a squat spire, Perpendicular windows, a timber chancel screen and an east window of 1927 by Kemp and Tower. Inside are a tablet to Wilson himself, who died in 1830, and a monument to the Chapman family of 1836, a weeping figure over an urn. The parish encourages you to walk through the graveyard, which it offers up for "the spectacular views of The Abbey, Whitby and beyond."

Wilson's money came from elsewhere. In 1827 he owned a sugar plantation on St Vincent worked by 231 enslaved people, and as MP for York he used his first speech in the Commons to oppose immediate emancipation. The church he paid for still stands over the village.

Ice cream from the farm

For food that is not the pub, there is Beacon Farm, where Michael and Zoe began making ice cream from surplus milk after the milk quotas of the 1980s and moved here late in 1989. The parlour and converted-barn tearoom now run to more than twenty flavours — cinder toffee, rhubarb crumble, liquorice and blackcurrant, raspberry cheesecake, and sorbets of mango, lemon and wild berry — alongside sandwiches, homemade soup, paninis, a full English and home baking. There is a free outdoor play area and a woodland nature trail, which makes it an easy stop with children.

Through the forest to Falling Foss

The walking runs south into Sneaton Forest, across the Esk at Ruswarp. The May Beck circuit is two miles and about ninety minutes, following woodland paths to the Falling Foss tea garden and a thirty-foot waterfall before returning beside the beck; the paths are stony and there are steep drops near the fall, so dogs go on short leads. Along the way stands Midge Hall, an eighteenth-century gamekeeper's cottage that became a tea garden by the 1930s, was abandoned in the 1960s and reopened in 2008, and the Hermitage, a small dwelling cut into a single vast boulder.

Reaching Sneaton—and the stone that left

There is no regular bus into Sneaton — the services that reach the road end run on school days only — so plan on a car or taxi, the nearest station being Whitby on the Esk Valley Line. When Whitby came to replace the wooden treads of its 199 Steps in 1774, the stone was cut from here.