Staintondale

A Scattered Village and Its Church

The pub, the school, the smithy and the Quaker meeting house are all still standing in Staintondale, and every one of them is now somebody's house. This is a village you have to look at closely. It does not gather around a green or a high street; it scatters along the lanes in isolated clusters of farms and cottages, with the junction at Prior Wath Road serving as the closest thing to a centre. The buildings are sandstone under red clay pantiles and slate, and the land tips gently eastward toward grazed fields and the North Sea beyond them.

The church, St John the Baptist, is younger than it looks, built in the 1920s and kept in a tidy graveyard with a view across the fields to the water. It is open most days from March to October, looked after by the Friends of St John, though it is worth checking access locally before you rely on the door being unlocked.

Miniature Trains and Coastal Paths

At Moorland House there is a fully signalled miniature railway, with two signal boxes and as many as five trains running at once. It is private for most of the year, but on its charity open days the gardens come with homemade cakes, a plant stall and a tombola. Lisa Williams, one of the people behind it, describes the setting simply: "you look out to sea and then you've got the moors over the other side."

Walking is the real reason to be here. The Cinder Track, the old Scarborough–Whitby railway, runs flat and cycle-friendly past Staintondale's surviving platforms and on to the visitor centre at Ravenscar. From the village a three-kilometre circuit links the track to the Cleveland Way, climbing to a lane and crossing a grassy field before returning along the clifftop. A little north, footpaths drop through wind-bent oak woodland to Hayburn Wyke, a rocky cove where Hayburn Beck reaches the beach in a double waterfall.

Inns Beyond the Village

There is no pub in the village itself, so you drive a short way to eat. The Bryherstones Country Inn at Cloughton Newlands, run by Paul and Sally Shipley, does Sally's Famous Steak Pie under a homemade shortcrust top, fresh haddock with mushy peas and homemade tartare sauce, and Whitby battered whole scampi tails; the steaks come from Radford's Butchers, dry-aged on the bone for at least thirty days. There is a large rear garden with a small play area, and two little private dining rooms, one called the Old Games Room. The Hayburn Wyke Inn, an eighteenth-century coaching inn in the woods near the coast, keeps wooden floors, beams, an open fire and hand-pulled Yorkshire ales, and welcomes well-behaved dogs in the bar.

Hospitallers, Quakers and Railway

Staintondale's history is quieter than its buildings suggest. Richard I granted the manor to the Knights Hospitaller, who ran it as a camera receiving guests and pilgrims until it was mistakenly seized as Templar property around 1308 and then handed back. A Quaker meeting settled here in 1669, holding its gatherings at William Worfolk's Rigg Hall before a meeting house was built with his bequest. The railway that gave the village its platforms opened in 1885 and never paid its way: in one week of 1964, wages for Cloughton and Staintondale came to £160 against six pounds in ticket sales, and the last passenger train ran in March 1965.

Arriving by Road, Rail and Bus

Scarborough, about seven miles away as the crow flies, is the nearest station, reached down minor roads to the A171, and the East Yorkshire buses along the coast will drop you at the village. The appeal, though, is the quiet: the church door left open through the summer, and the sea sitting at the bottom of the fields.