West Ayton

Across the Bridge for Supper

The Forge Valley Inn stands beside Ayton Bridge, an eighteenth-century former coaching inn on the road where the River Derwent divides West Ayton from East Ayton. John Carr designed the bridge in 1776; a second road bridge followed in 1962. Inside, the inn keeps a lounge, a back bar, a restaurant and a high-ceilinged function room, with a real fire and a spacious beer garden that runs to a covered, heated area at one end. Dogs and children are welcome. The kitchen does home-cooked meals and a Sunday carvery, and the bar pours Timothy Taylor Landlord, Black Sheep Best Bitter and Timothy Taylor Boltmaker, with a changing guest beer alongside them.

Cross the river into East Ayton and there is more to eat. Walkers Fish Restaurant has been frying in beef dripping since 1993, taking its fish from sustainable sources, with gluten-free batter available if you ask. Beyond haddock and chips, the current menu includes Atlantic prawn and crayfish cocktail, smoked haddock chowder, haddock-and-prawn mornay, and a battered-haddock brioche fish butty; the coffee, maple and walnut pavlova is worth leaving room for.

Farm Treats and Village Essentials

Betton Farm, a little way north-east, is a farm shop, bakery and tearoom run as a social enterprise that gives work experience to people with learning disabilities. It bakes its own bread and cakes, scoops Beacon Farm ice cream, sells Bracken Hill preserves and bottled North Riding Brewery beer, and makes picnic sandwiches to order. The afternoon tea comes with freshly baked scones and clotted cream. Children can meet lambs and piglets in spring, alongside goats, rabbits and guinea pigs.

Back in West Ayton the everyday amenities are modest. The Derwent Valley BRIDGE, a volunteer-run community library, sits at 3 Pickering Road.

Into Forge Valley

The reason most people come is the valley itself. The Derwent cuts through the Tabular Hills just north of the village to form Forge Valley, a wooded gorge that is now a National Nature Reserve, and the name records an iron forge once worked here whose exact site is lost. A circular walk of ten miles sets off from outside the inn and works through woodland, fields and farmland to Hackness and back; a shorter riverside line leaves past the castle and follows the water north. Part of the Forge Valley footpath is temporarily closed because the boardwalk is unsafe. One walker described the Derwent on the Forge Valley path as "my constant companion until the end of the walk."

Ayton Castle stands in a field on the edge of the village, reachable by footpath; access inside the tower is not established. Sir Ralph Eure built it as a tower house in the late fourteenth century in the style of his native Northumberland, yet there is no sign it was ever attacked, and its plan suggests defence was not really the point. The last person recorded living there died in 1679, after which it was probably pulled down piece by piece. The earthworks around it still hold the shape of a medieval hall, a kitchen, a dovecote and fishponds, the largest pond about seventy metres long.

Working Water and Wider Days

The railway came late and left early. Forge Valley station opened in 1882 on the Scarborough–Pickering line; passenger trains stopped in 1950, and the brick station building, platform and goods shed still stand. High Mill on Mill Lane, a watermill of about 1800, is another survivor of the working village the river once powered.

Scarborough is about eight kilometres east, reached directly by the number 3 bus, with the 28 running west towards Pickering and Helmsley. For a family day the North Yorkshire Water Park at nearby Wykeham Lakes has paddleboarding, kayaking and inflatable aqua parks.

The Sound of the Mill Races

On a quiet day, the loudest thing in the old core is the water running through the mill races.