Suffield

Cider, Cordials and Living Fields

At Hillcrest Cottage there is a cider press that turns out about 3,000 litres in a good year, and when it sells out that is the end of it until the next autumn. This is Tree Top Press, the farm shop and no-dig market garden run by Adam and Ruby Tildsley, who bought two fields here in 2016 and started small. Adam used his mother's 1954 Women's Institute book to make cordials and apple juice, first sold from an honesty box, before any of it became a shop.

What grows on those fields now runs well beyond apples. The apples themselves are heritage varieties — Brownlees Russet, Ashmead's Kernel, Pitmaston Pineapple — pressed into a blended cider, and the cordials run through redcurrant, white-currant, gooseberry, raspberry and rhubarb. Alongside them are seasonal vegetables and veg boxes — the farm's own produce grown without artificial pesticides or fertiliser — as well as Ruby's baking, organic bread and dairy, local honey, preserves, and frozen free-range poultry and pork. Four ponds have colonised naturally, a wildflower meadow has been left to itself, and one field is turning into woodland without anyone planting a tree. Adam calls it "simple things done in a thinking way."

Plateau Hamlet and Scalby Table

This is a hamlet in the proper sense — three farms make up most of it, set behind broad grassy verges, with pairs of houses scattered along the road and wide gaps between them. The older buildings are sandstone under red clay pantiles, with low dry-stone walls, five-bar gates and mature trees framing the lot. It has changed very little since the middle of the nineteenth century, set on an elevated plateau above the surrounding wooded valleys.

For a pub you go to Scalby, about two miles east, where The Plough has eight rooms and an AA rosette held three years running. The kitchen reaches further than a village pub usually does: steamed Shetland mussels with samphire, a chicken and pancetta pie with braised carrot and hispi cabbage, sea bream with a potato terrine and lobster bisque, fillet steak with triple-cooked chips. Dogs are welcome in the bar with well-behaved owners, advance notice requested. The travel writer Kevin Rushby found it "a boon for walkers."

Bridleways, Sea Cut and Woodland

The walking is the reason to be here. The best of it starts near Scalby: west along the Keld Runnels bridleway, then back beside the Sea Cut, with otters to watch for if you are lucky. A longer circuit from Hackness School climbs through Greengate Wood past an old lime kiln, crosses by Suffield Ings and drops down Hawthorn Wood to Mowthorpe Farm before following the Sea Cut back to Scalby. Raincliffe and Forge Valley Woods, a little further, offer free parking, picnic sites and daily access, with dogs allowed under control.

Hackness Church Through the Centuries

The parish church is at Hackness, in the next valley — St Peter's, Grade I, with a chancel arch of the eleventh century or earlier and a fifteenth-century spire. St Hilda of Whitby founded a religious community on the site in 680. Inside are two fragments of a finely carved Anglo-Saxon cross and eight fifteenth-century misericords worked with vines, a mask and grotesques.

Coast, Lanes and Practical Arrival

Scarborough is four and a half miles off, for the beaches and the headland castle. It is also the nearest station; the closest bus stops are in Scalby, and no A-road runs through Suffield itself; you arrive by minor lanes from Scalby or Hackness, which is part of the point. Bring a car, and time your visit for autumn, before the year's cider is gone.