St Gregory's Minster and Kirkdale Cave

St Gregory's Minster stands alone in a wooded valley near Kirkbymoorside, and above its door is a sundial inscribed around 1060 recording that Orm Gamalson rebuilt the church in the days of King Edward and Earl Tostig. It is one of the finest Anglo-Saxon sundials in the country. A short walk up the lane, in the face of an old quarry, Kirkdale Cave was found in 1821 packed with the bones of hyenas, hippos, elephants and rhinos, evidence that changed how early 19th-century scientists understood the age of the earth. Hodge Beck beside the church disappears underground in dry weather.