The village appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Hoton. It has been spelled Hege-Hoton, Hoton under Heg, and Hewton over the centuries; the modern Hutton-le-Hole - meaning roughly the place of the burial ground near the hollow - did not settle in until the 19th century. Near the end of the 13th century the manor was granted to St Mary's Abbey in York. By the 1600s the village had become a Quaker community: weavers and small farmers who built a Meeting House in 1698 and buried their dead in a small ground beside it. The Quaker evangelist John Richardson died here in 1753 at the age of 87 and was buried at the nearby Kirkbymoorside Friends Meeting House, which still stands as a Grade II listed building. The Hutton-le-Hole Meeting House was converted into a residence in 1859, though Quaker burials continued at the site until 1868.

The Ryedale Folk Museum at the southern end of the village is the kind of thing Britain does well: thirteen rescued historic buildings collected and reconstructed in one field. An Iron Age round house. An Elizabethan manor. Thatched cottages. Period shops and workshops, including the photographic studio of William Hayes, believed to be the oldest daylight photographic studio in England - built in Monkgate, York, in 1902 and moved here in 1991. Until 1997 the field hosted something even stranger: the world championship in Nine Men's Morris, an ancient board game played on a grid of three concentric squares connected by lines. Champions came from across the world to push wooden counters around the boards at a folk museum in the North York Moors. The championships have moved on, but the museum continues, with crafts and workshops in season.

Hutton-le-Hole carries twenty-nine Grade II-listed buildings - most of them 18th-century stone cottages with red pantiled roofs in the Yorkshire idiom. There is a 1935 K6 telephone box, the classic Giles Gilbert Scott design painted Post Office red, still in service. There is a sundial from 1833. St Chad's Church, built in 1934 on the site of an earlier Zion Chapel, holds Anglican services as part of the Lastingham Benefice. The first schoolhouse opened in 1845 and was replaced in 1875 - that building is now a holiday let, like a number of others around the village. A Grade II* listing protects a cluster of stone-and-pantile houses that look exactly as they did in the 1800s, except now the inhabitants are weekend visitors rather than Quaker weavers.

The walk that the National Park Authority recommends is two miles long and ends at the ancient church of St Mary in Lastingham, where a Saxon crypt has stood since 1078 above the bones of Saint Cedd. You leave Hutton-le-Hole past the Folk Museum, cross fields stitched with drystone walls, and arrive at one of the oldest continuously functioning churches in northern England. The Tabular Hills Walk passes through both places. Hutton Beck, which makes the village what it is, joins Catter Beck and then the River Seven a few miles south, and from there flows into the River Rye. The car park at the north end of the village - large, pay-and-display - fills up early in summer. The sheep ignore the cars completely, as is their right under several centuries of common grazing.