Spaunton

Flour, Greens and the Moorland Edge

At Hill Top Farm, Philip Trevelyan grows organic wheat and rye and mills it into flour. The strong white, wholemeal, dark rye and light rye go out to bakers across the region: Haxby Bakehouse, Bluebird Bakery in Malton, The Baker's House in Helmsley, Stark Farm Bakery. Home bakers collect by arrangement, since this is a working mill and not a shop. Trevelyan was born in 1943 to the painter Julian Trevelyan and the potter Ursula Darwin, a descendant of both Charles Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood.

That is roughly the shape of Spaunton: a single street on a hilltop between Hutton-le-Hole and Lastingham, with the useful things either made here or a short drive off. The houses sit back behind greens, which the National Park design guide describes as a "wide, spaced out feel," their walls a mix of limestone and sandstone under red clay pantile roofs. Arriving from the moor, you meet the greens, the grazing common and the open heather abruptly, one after the other.

Common Rights and the Pub Down the Road

Near the middle of the village is the pinfold, a small stone enclosure that once held stray livestock until the owner reclaimed them and paid a fine. It is still here because the institution that built it is still here. The Manor of Spaunton Court Leet meets at Spaunton Manor House, at the east end of the street, on the first Thursday in October, summoning fourteen common-right owners — twelve jurors and two affearors — to deal with encroachments on the common: driveways, signs, front gardens creeping outward, and the protection of grazing and turbary rights. The Lord of the Manor traditionally gives a luncheon afterwards. The recorded fare is hare pie followed by Christmas pudding.

There is no pub in Spaunton itself, so the evening means a short drive. The Blacksmiths Arms in Lastingham faces St Mary's church and serves what its proprietor calls "good honest Yorkshire pub food": Blacksmiths steak-and-ale pie with chips, Cumberland sausage with cheddar mash and onion relish, slow-cooked daube of beef with bubble and squeak and a thyme dumpling, lemon-and-herb-crusted cod with chorizo. Dogs are welcome in one of the restaurants, the side bar and the garden, where in season they do pizza. Theakston Old Peculier, Theakston Best Bitter and Saltaire Blonde are the regular ales. The Moors Inn at Appleton-le-Moors is the other option, on the nine-mile cycle circuit that loops through Lastingham, Spaunton and Appleton.

Moorland Miles and Wartime Memory

The walking is the reason to stay. A four-mile circuit from Hutton-le-Hole to Lastingham returns over the Spaunton escarpment, with gates but no stiles and one steep, muddy climb through woodland; allow about two and a half hours. The longer Ana Cross route crosses Spaunton Moor for about 5.7 miles past old ironstone workings, where a ring ouzel is a possibility. Dogs stay on leads near the grazing and the game birds. St Mary's rewards the walk for its crypt alone, an apsidal chamber begun in 1078 for a Benedictine abbey that never came — its founder, Stephen of Whitby, left for York to build St Mary's Abbey instead. The church stands on the site of St Cedd's monastery of AD 654.

Malton is the nearest useful mainline railhead; Pickering, about five miles south-east, has the heritage railway, and the lanes in between are minor moorland lanes. The Domesday surveyors counted nine households here and valued the place at ten shillings. On the night of 7 October 1943 a Lancaster came down by Manor Farm soon after taking off from Linton-on-Ouse. The crew bailed out safely. George Otterburn Strickland, a farmer, was killed when the blast drove a heavy door onto him, and his sister, in the same house, survived. The site is private ground now.

A Museum Afternoon

For an afternoon out of the wind, the Ryedale Folk Museum at Hutton-le-Hole spreads more than twenty historic buildings across six acres, dogs allowed, with children's trails and a patch of ride-on tractors for the smallest visitors.