Westerdale

Church, School and Village Life

A fragment of a twelfth-century arch is set into the west tower of Christ Church, built on a medieval site. The church you see was built in 1838 and altered in 1875 by W. Falkenbridge. Its porch shelters three medieval grave covers and cross fragments; inside, the nave keeps an 1838 strutted king-post roof, and a stained-glass window of Gospel parables is signed "HH 1957." In the churchyard a weathered slab remembers Jane Duck, who died in 1740 and left money to the village school.

The present village hall began as a school, designed by Harry Pattin of Leeds around 1873; it taught village children until 1953, and reopened as the village hall in the early 1970s. It stands in grassy, wooded grounds with parking and a defibrillator on the outside wall, and the hall is in the centre of the village. The village is a church, a hall, farms and houses. There is no pub and no shop today.

The Dale and Its Medieval Bridge

What there is instead is the dale. Westerdale is a nucleated settlement, which is unusual on these moors, built in local stone under pantile roofs. The valley is broad and shallow until it meets Upper Esk Dale and narrows hard; Castleton Rigg dominates many eastern views and moorland closes in on the rest. The River Esk and Tower Beck drain two dale heads split by Westerdale Rigg, with hedges and pastoral fields low down, dry-stone walls and heather higher up. Small tips and slag heaps are left over from jet and ironstone working.

Just north of the village, Hunter's Sty Bridge carries an old track over the Esk on a single ribbed arch of nearly six metres. It was probably built in the late thirteenth century to reach the Royal Forest of Pickering, and its name means "hunter's steep path." Octavius Duncombe, son of the first Baron Feversham, restored it in 1874, and the panels carry the Duncombe crest and a record of the work.

Following the Esk Valley Walk

The village sits on the Esk Valley Walk. The waymarked thirty-seven-mile route climbs from Castleton up Danby Dale to the moorland source of the Esk, drops down through Westerdale, returns to Castleton and then follows the river to Whitby; the day section taking in Danby Dale, Blakey and Westerdale runs to 15.2 miles. You cross heather moorland, narrow wooded gorges and the moorland crosses of Blakey Rigg, with yellow waymarks for footpaths and blue for bridleways.

Templars and the Duncombe Legacy

Long before the walkers, the manor belonged to the Knights Templar, who held a preceptory here from 1203 until the order was suppressed in 1310–12. A Hospitallers camera held it from 1312 until 1538, and in 1545 it passed to George and Edmund Knight. Nothing of it stands above ground now. Westerdale is not in Domesday Book at all, though Dr Aleksandra McClain, reading a study of the medieval dale, describes "a bustling hive of activity within the confines of its valley." Westerdale Hall, a Baronial Tudor shooting box built for the Duncombes before 1874, keeps its crow-stepped gables, armorial glass and a five-storey battlemented tower.

Castleton Connections

Castleton, two and a half miles off, is where the practical business of a stay happens. Castleton Moor station sits on Northern's Esk Valley line between Middlesbrough and Whitby, unstaffed and step-free to its single platform, with no toilets or refreshments. From Westerdale itself it is ten miles by road to Stokesley and nineteen to Whitby, and the DR10 "Whitby Shopper" runs from Westerdale down through the dale on alternate Thursdays, pre-booked. Castleton is also where you find the pub. The Downe Arms is run by Johnathon and Ashley, and the kitchen does steak-and-ale pie in homemade pastry, fish and chips, Sunday roasts, sticky toffee pudding and a homemade cheesecake that changes week to week. Well-behaved dogs get water bowls and treats in the bar, and the couple's young son, Mason, is billed as the real landlord.