Hutton le Hole

Quaint? Picturesque? You bet – in bucket loads. In fact, utterly charming Hutton le Hole is a byword for beauty when it comes to moorland villages. With a beck running right down the middle, sheep-cropped grassy banks and ancient stone houses, it's the sort of picture-perfect place that tourists love, and they come in their thousands every summer. The open-air Ryedale Folk Museum is the main draw, though there are lovely local moorland walks too, a decent village pub and a couple of cafés. The Frenchified 'le', by the way, was a Victorian affectation to make Hutton sound a bit posher and more genteel, but at its heart this has been a solid farming community for centuries, with the local sheep still very much lords of the manor as they amble around the roads and lawns with absolutely no regard for the traffic.