Swainby

Crook Beck and the Village Pubs

Crook Beck flows along the village, with houses close along the bank, and road and foot bridges cross the beck. The buildings are sandstone under pantile roofs, and in the north of the village the road splits to run along both banks. It is a linear place, following the water.

Two pubs sit close together. The Black Horse, at 23 High Street, keeps open fires, a large beer garden, and the practical things a family arrives needing — parking, disabled facilities, baby-changing — along with Sunday lunches and cask ales. On Black Horse Lane, the Blacksmiths Arms is a family-run free house, also with real fires, its patio terrace looking over the beck. One visitor, Mandy of Yarm, remembered the Yorkshire pudding that came with her Sunday lunch as a huge one.

Coffee, Cycles and Holy Cross

Between the two pubs, at 20 Black Horse Lane, the Rusty Bike combines a coffee shop with bicycle hire and welcomes dogs. It serves carrot-and-coriander soup, scones with jam and clotted cream, cakes, coffee and tea. Shelves hold local honey, cycling gifts, and paintings and cards by local artist Jane Kitching; there is also a wood-burner. The village hall's volunteer GAP café serves bacon butties and barista coffee, and the hall also hosts an outreach Post Office.

Holy Cross, the parish church, was built in 1877 to a design by T. H. Wyatt and consecrated that October, replacing the old church over at Whorlton. Inside there is Kempe glass, a First World War memorial screen, and six bells cast the same year by John Warner & Sons, the smallest possibly carried over from the older building. The hanging rood was carved by Otto Zwink of Oberammergau, after the vicar, the Revd A. P. B. Barker, came home from the Passion Play there.

Whorlton's Church and Castle

At Whorlton, north-east of Swainby, the church that Holy Cross replaced remains a ruin apart from its chancel. Its Norman arcades have scalloped capitals, and there is a fourteenth-century tower, a tub font and an earlier oak effigy in a relocated late-Perpendicular tomb recess. Beside it is Whorlton Castle, which began as a Norman motte-and-bailey and gained a stone tower house in the fourteenth century; the de Meynells held it from the twelfth to the sixteenth. The surrounding ground still shows the garden earthworks, ponds and house plots of the deserted medieval village. The castle is privately owned.

Paths Above the Village

Both sit along circular walks from the village. The Swainby, Live Moor and Whorl Hill circular is 6.2 miles with 286 metres of climb, returning past the castle with Roseberry Topping in the distance; a second six-mile loop through Lower Scugdale follows Scugdale Beck and part of the Cleveland Way, with the Tees Valley and the Pennines opening out beyond. West of the village the land drops away into the Vale of Mowbray, while the wooded slopes east and south rise towards the Cleveland Hills.

Roads, Buses and the Railway Trace

Getting here, you are close to the A172 and A19, and buses 80 and 89 link Northallerton and Stokesley through the village; Stokesley itself is about five minutes by car. In 1858 a two-mile branch line was laid from Swainby to Potto to carry ironstone. The old line remains visible in places as a strong line of vegetation along the eastern edge of the village, following where the trains once ran.