Village of the Week: Swainby, the site of three RAF plane crashes and the best beef sandwiches

While that alone is enough to make you smile, the idle chatter around me also does.

The village of Swainby, in the Hambleton district of North Yorkshire, sits between the popular towns of Northallerton and Stokesley and while they are obvious pulls for visitors to take a look around and locals to make use of the local services as they go about their daily business – Swainby is like sitting down for a breather 50 years ago.

I obviously wasn’t around then and will happily stand corrected by regular readers but I don’t imagine that the way of life in this picturesque backwater has altered much.

Of course there are the obvious things such as internet connection and WiFi and maybe more properties are mains connected than they were, but on the face of it, Swainby is pretty, charming and a well-loved village.

That takes me back to the beef sandwich.

The tables around us are full and the banter is flowing between the owner and the customers who are clearly regulars.

The talk ranges from how long it has been raining for (standard for most places of late perhaps) and whether they could train their own cows to do tricks (I gleamed from this that someone had seen something similar on the internet or television).

Anyway, the general consensus was that they wouldn’t have a cat in hell’s chance.

The said beef sandwich is being served up in Swainby Village Shop. The front of the building has the tables for the cafe and while we are turning up a little late in the day, it is obviously popular as the advertised hot soup and a roll has been snapped up along with the hot roast pork sandwiches but the two lovely ladies manning the till and the cooking weren’t going to leave us going hungry.

Towards the back of the store is a traditional sweet counter with one of those old Cadbury’s signs and there are other reminders of times gone by.

Old photographs adorn the walls and metal tins for OXO, Brillo and Yorkshire Tea will get the memory going.

There are other goods on sale for the local resident such as jams, tins of soup and other groceries and even the four legged friends don’t miss out with an array of dog food and treats.

A few doors down there is an absolute gem of a shop with much more packed into it than its exterior may suggest.

Ten Good Reasons it is called and I struggled to find ten good reasons not to purchase half of the shop which is in what used to be the old schoolroom.

Bags, candles, soaps, cards, cushions, pots, baskets and some bathing products, notebooks and socks adorn the shelves.

The cards captured a border collie in several settings and it turns out the dog belonged to the shop owner and her husband had taken the pictures for the cards.

From one collie owner to another, we started chatting as you do, and she pointed us in the direction of Cod Beck not too far away where I could take the dog for a run.

I left with just soap, a couple of dinner candles, some Himalayan bath salts and a whole load more local knowledge then before I had gone in.

We did venture up to Cod Beck and followed the instructions to basically head right away from the shop along the main high street in the village.

The row of houses are quaint and some step straight onto the street, others are set back and surrounded by neat privets and cottage gardens.

Some are farm houses or conversions from farm buildings that have followed and many houses were built in the 19th century to accommodate miners who worked the nearby hills for ironstone and jet.

It led to the expansion of the village which has its origins in farming and land-owning families.

The place name is derived from a meaning of ‘Farm of the young men’ and over the years has been recorded as Suanebi, Suenebi and Swayneby. It was the site of an old drover’s road to the moors and Sutton Bank and what would eventually become the A170.

Swainby was included with Whorlton in the Domesday Book, although it was not mentioned by name and at that time it would appear that Whorlton was the place of more significance.

Well, Whorlton does have its own castle, but that and much of the rest of the hamlet, was abandoned as anyone who survived an outbreak of what was thought to be the Black Death fled. It is likely that Swainby became more populated then.

As the High Street climbs up to become Shepherd Hill, a mist that was lingering in the sky at the bottom of the village suddenly envelopes you as the winding road gets narrower and higher.

So high above the North York Moors National Park in fact, that the cloud clears to reveal a Lord of the Rings type landscape with woodland made up of dense conifers, a still body of water and the route of the Lyke Wake Walk heading off into the distance.

Some of Swainby’s other oldest buildings remain. The Blacksmith’s Arms pub, dating back to 1742 and the Middle Bridge over Swainby Beck built in 1805 for example.

The Cleveland and Teesside Local History Society has some dates of note in the history of village life.

In 1886 a farmer’s wife was killed by a mineral train as she walked towards Potto, in 1938 The Scott Trial annual motor cycle challenge was based at Swainby, in 1941, 1944 and 1952 RAF planes crashed into the hills above the village killing pilots, crew and others in all three cases.