Ugthorpe

Two pubs, two kinds of welcome

The Black Bull keeps no television. It stands on Postgate Way, a pantiled inn with a main bar, a snug and a games room, its walls hung with photographs of village life. Theakston Old Peculier is the regular cask beer, with a changing guest alongside it, and the beer garden at the back looks out across the North York Moors. Dogs are welcome in that garden but not indoors. There is pool, darts and quoits if the weather keeps you in.

The village has a second place to drink, the Ugthorpe Lodge Hotel, just off the A171 at the edge of things. Stephen and Julie run it, with two log burners, a recently renovated bar and more than fifteen gins. Children are allowed in the bar, dogs too, and there are garden games outside. If you are staying, breakfast runs from a light plate to a full English.

Postgate Way and the two churches

Ugthorpe itself is a single line running east to west along Postgate Way. Most of the houses sit on the north side; to the south an open field falls away to farmland and long views. Sandstone, red clay pantiles, stone walls and native hedges recur down the street. Benches are set along the way, with a Jubilee seat near Christ Church.

Two churches went up here within a couple of years of each other in the mid-1850s. St Anne's, the Roman Catholic one, was built in 1855 to a design by George Goldie and paid for by the Nelson family, who then turned an older 1810 chapel into a school. It is local sandstone ashlar under Welsh slate, with a squat west tower, stone Celtic crosses, a painted high altar and reredos, patterned sanctuary tiles, and stained glass in the east and west windows attributed to John Hardman Powell. Christ Church, the Anglican one, was built in 1855-57. Its original plan counted 282 seats, and a £115 building grant carried a condition that Vicar William Long recorded on the drawing: that "all the seats be reserved free and unappropriated." No family could rent a pew.

The Catholic thread and its walk

The Catholic story is the older one. Ugthorpe claims unbroken Catholic worship since the Reformation. Blessed Nicholas Postgate lived and ministered from the village from about 1660 until his martyrdom in 1679; after him, Father John Bradshaw kept provision going from a chapel in the loft of his cottage. Father George Haydock arrived in 1803 and spent six years editing a new edition of the Douai Bible here, between 1808 and 1814. The Postgate Rally and Mass still take place each July, alternating between Ugthorpe and Egton Bridge. Postgate was beatified in 1987 and his feast day is 7 August. One of his successors at Ugthorpe left a line that has lasted: "From the moors of Yorkshire, Good Lord deliver us."

The five miles between those two churches make a walk in their own right. The Postgate Walk runs from St Hedda's at Egton Bridge to St Anne's, though it is no route for buggies or wheelchairs. Closer in, a circuit goes from Ugthorpe Church past Mulgrave Farm and Ugthorpe Grange and back again.

Arriving between moor and coast

Getting here, the village sits north of the A171, between it and the A174, with Whitby eight miles off and the sandy beach at Runswick Bay about fifteen minutes away by car. The nearest station is Lealholm, some three miles off, unstaffed but step-free and with no car park. Arriva's X93 and X94 run along the main road; the Lodge is a hundred metres from the stop, the Black Bull a good deal further in.

The Old Hall and Bacon House

The Old Hall, dated 1586, is a sandstone house under a steep pantile roof, private and lived in. In the 1930s the village kept two cobblers, a watchmaker, a joiner and a bacon factory with its own slaughterhouse, run by the Hart family. The building is still called the Bacon House.