Thorgill

Thorgill Above the Dale

A disused post box sits at the edge of Thorgill, made of concrete rather than the usual iron, no longer collecting anything and slowly wearing down. It is a small trace of the hamlet's lost infrastructure. Thorgill is a handful of sandstone farms and cottages on high ground above Rosedale, strung along a single-track lane that narrows until it gives up and becomes a farm track. Low stone walls, small cottage gardens, a few sweeping farmhouse ones, and pantile roofs make up nearly all of it. The National Park describes the place as "home to a handful of farms and small cottages (all in stone)."

Thorgill itself has no pub, shop or church. For those you walk or drive the quiet lane down into Rosedale Abbey, the service village for the whole dale, and it is worth the short trip.

Rosedale Food and Drink

Rosedale Abbey has two working inns. The Coach House Inn runs a kitchen that names its dishes with some confidence: Desperate Dan steak pie, beef carbonnade made with Theakston Old Peculier, herb-crusted haddock with lime-and-chilli butter, and black-pudding fritters served with Rosedale apple-and-chilli jam. Theakston Best Bitter is the regular cask beer, with changing ales from Helmsley, Jolly Sailor and Rudgate. Dogs are welcome in the bar, there is a garden, and York CAMRA named it Town and Country Pub of the Season in 2019. Up on the hillside, the White Horse Farm Inn is a 16th-century building with exposed beams, a log fire and a terrace looking out over the dale. Recent menus have leaned into local supply: lamb shank braised in local-ale gravy, locally farmed lamb's liver, a double-crust steak-and-ale pie, Yorkshire pork sausages, a giant Yorkshire pudding, and beer-battered, locally sourced haddock. It advertises dog-friendly rooms, and doggy treats are available.

For daytime, the Abbey Stores doubles as a tearoom, doing breakfasts with the local butcher's bacon and sausages, homemade cakes, scones and cream teas, and stocking the ordinary essentials of maps, milk and newspapers. Graze on the Green pours locally roasted coffee, and Abbey Farm Cottage sells goat's cheeses under its own names, among them Bell End Blue and The Rosedale.

Walking the Industrial Dale

The walking is the real reason to be up here. A seven-and-a-half-mile circuit from the village green crosses farmland, follows a signed path along the lane through Thorgill to Dale Head, then returns on the bed of the old ironstone railway past the ruined calcining kilns, which you view from the track and do not enter. Expect gates, one stile, farmyards and livestock, and keep dogs on a lead along the railway. In spring the dale carries native wild daffodils and ring ouzels nest among the heather.

Ironstone, Legend and Access

The mining is why any of this exists. Rich ore was found near Hollins Farm in 1853, the railway reached Low Bearing in 1865, and Rosedale's population climbed from 548 in 1851 to 2,839 twenty years later, before mining finally left the dale in 1926. Thorgill's own mines, higher up, had already been demolished by 1911. The name is traditionally tied to Thor, because the magnetic ironstone was said to draw lightning, and local legend held that a strike on the exposed Bank Top seam meant either the devil or buried treasure. The nearest trains are at Danby or Castleton Moor, both about seven miles off on the Esk Valley line — worth checking which gives the better route from wherever you're staying — with a summer Moorsbus and a Monday-only bus reaching Rosedale Abbey.

The Rosedale Show

Come in mid-August and the dale gathers for the Rosedale Show on the old Milburn Arms field: terrier racing, a gymkhana, livestock classes, vintage tractors, children's sports and refreshments, held down the lane from a hamlet that no longer has a working post box of its own.