Thimbleby

Estate Roots and Village Character

At Hill Top Farm, behind a long range of stone outbuildings, a gin gang still stands, built in stone under a pantile roof. It has survived, and it tells you what Thimbleby was for.

The village is a single quiet street. Houses face the road across grass verges and low garden walls, built in the local ironstone-rich sandstone under clay pantiles, with stone chimneys and timber sash windows. This was an estate village: the Thimbleby Estate laid out neat rows of houses for its agricultural workers and kept firm control of the place until it began breaking up in the 1970s. Behind some of the plots, ridge-and-furrow earthworks are still visible from the air, and from the north end the view crosses farmland towards Hemmel Hill. The National Park describes it, plainly enough, as "a quiet street of houses at Thimbleby."

The Estate Café and Osmotherley Essentials

There is no pub and no shop in the village. What Thimbleby does have, on the estate, is the Shooting Ground clubhouse café, open to non-shooters as well as shots. It does seasonal breakfasts, breakfast rolls, light lunches and sweet things, with an outdoor terrace, a wood burner for colder days and a welcome for dogs. The shooting ground itself has been running since 1988 and teaches complete beginners alongside experienced guns.

For the pub, the shop and most other services, you walk or drive the mile up to Osmotherley. The Golden Lion, an old inn on West End, does locally sourced pub food — chilli beef, a Scotch egg, a buttermilk chicken burger, hake, beef Wellington, cheesecake and bread-and-butter pudding among them — and keeps changing Yorkshire ales; dogs are welcome. The Three Tuns is more restaurant than bar, with wood panelling and Rennie Mackintosh-style ironwork, and the Queen Catherine runs one long room from lounge to dining end, popular with walkers. Osmotherley's Top Shop sells groceries, meat, fresh Danby Bakery bread, local Yorkshire honey and Brymor ice cream.

Walking and Layers of History

The walking is the reason most people come. The Thimbleby Bank circular is four and a half miles from Osmotherley, passing through Thimbleby before climbing old tracks past abandoned quarries and a hanging stone, then dropping back through pine and broadleaf woodland, across Oakdale Beck and along a stretch of the Cleveland Way; on a clear day you can see the Pennines and the entrance to Wensleydale. For something gentler, Cod Beck Reservoir north of Osmotherley gives you a flat, well-surfaced mile and a half around the water.

The history is quiet but not thin. Thimbleby appears in Domesday as Timbelbi, recorded as waste by 1086; ten houses were taxed here in the 1301 lay subsidy. Robert Haynes, born in Barbados and an owner of plantations there, lived at Thimbleby Lodge for much of the 19th century. On the estate, a Second World War Starfish shelter controlled decoy fires meant to lure German bombers away from Middlesbrough's steel and chemical works.

The Show and Getting Here

Home Farm hosts the annual Osmotherley Show, with sheepdog trials, fell race, gun-dog scurry and children's classes among the entries. Northallerton and its station are six miles west; buses run only from Osmotherley. Otherwise the loudest thing at the north end of the street is the wind coming off the moor.