Two becks meet at Thirlby. Gurtof Beck and Mire Beck join at a ford in the oldest part of the village, and below the crossing they run on together as Thirlby Beck. The ford was once the main vehicular access across the beck. A footbridge beside East Farm and Bridge House now takes you over on foot; it was widened at some point in the late twentieth century.
The village is a single line of low sandstone cottages with red clay pantile roofs and brick chimney stacks, set back on open grass verges. It lies in a sheltered hollow about 200 metres below the Hambleton escarpment, roughly five miles east of Thirsk, on the boundary of the North York Moors. The nearest railway station is Thirsk, about eight kilometres off, managed by TransPennine Express.
Rose Cottage is the building to look for. It is probably early eighteenth century, two bays, its stone tooled in a herringbone pattern, and a fragment of decorated medieval masonry has been reused in one of its returns. Inside, an inglenook holds a nineteenth-century iron range with a water boiler and an oven.
What Thirlby does not have is a pub, a shop or public transport. There was once a pub, The Board; the list of village facilities now runs to a post box and a village hall. The hall is a wooden building thought to have begun as a First World War army hut, possibly from Catterick. It later served as Alice Mary Hansell's poultry shed before she gave it to the village as an institute, on marrying Charles Walker Luis Fernandes on 18 October 1922. The opening was marked by an orchestra brought from Leeds, and early members played billiards and went to whist drives. The village calls the hall today "modest but homely."
For food you go to Thirsk, about five miles west. There are two butchers — Frank Family Butchers, which makes its own sausages, and Johnsons — along with a greengrocer, a couple of bakeries and the Upstairs Downstairs delicatessen and tearoom. Thirsk is also home to the World of James Herriot, set in Alf Wight's own 1940s house and surgery, with the original fittings, TV sets and studios, and Austin Seven cars.
The nearest proper dinner is at The Carpenters Arms in Felixkirk, a food-led inn that cooks with produce from the Mount St John kitchen garden. The kitchen has served dishes such as a steak and Theakston ale pie, beer-battered Hartlepool haddock with triple-cooked chips, and a fish pie built from scallop, haddock, salmon and king prawn, though the menu changes with the seasons. Felixkirk also has St Felix's church, whose chancel arch of around 1125 carries zig-zag and beakhead carving, and which keeps the tomb of William de Cantilupe, who died in 1309.
The walk to Lake Gormire is Thirlby's best-known draw, and the village is firm about how to do it. Do not drive down the narrow dead-end lane, where there is very little suitable parking. Start instead at the Sutton Bank National Park Centre and walk down through the woods. The lake is private and protected, so you keep to the paths and you do not swim. The centre has a play area, cycle trails, viewpoints toward Gormire and Hood Hill, and the In the Wilde café, which lets dogs in and makes up picnic boxes to take away.
Thirlby has no pavements and no street lighting.