The Church of St Mary stands in a field about 800 metres from the village it used to serve. It has stood there since the 11th century, Anglo-Saxon stonework still visible in the walls, marking the place where the original village of Levisham was - until the Black Death came through in the 14th century and the survivors moved uphill to start over. The new village got its own church eventually, St John the Baptist. The old church fell into disuse in the 1950s. Burials still happen there, in the way that some old country churches collect a kind of permanent congregation. The walk from one church to the other is one of the strangest short walks in the North York Moors.
Levisham appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Leuecen, an Old Norse name meaning roughly the farmstead of Leofgeat's people. The Norse-Saxon hybrid is typical of the eastern moors, where Viking settlement layered onto older Anglo-Saxon villages and the place names still carry both languages. The earliest population would have been a few families - a dozen at most - working the thin soil on the moor's edge. Then in the 1340s came the plague. The English population fell by a third or more in two years. Many marginal villages simply disappeared. Levisham did not disappear, but it did move - up the hillside, away from whatever combination of bad water, bad memories, or bad luck had hollowed it out. The original site is now a Deserted Medieval Village earthwork, with St Mary's standing isolated where the houses used to crowd around it.
At the 2011 census the parish was bundled with neighbouring Lockton, so no separate population figure was recorded. A North Yorkshire County Council estimate in 2015 put it at 70. That probably has not changed much. The village runs along a single street of stone cottages with red pantile roofs, the kind that climb up out of the valley and crest near St John's Church. From 1974 to 2023 it was part of the district of Ryedale; since 2023 it has been administered by the new unitary North Yorkshire Council. There is a pub, the Horseshoe Inn, sitting at the head of the green. There is a Sunday service at St John's. There is, in the surrounding moor and the deep valley below, almost no one for miles - the kind of empty that holiday cottages in England rent for a premium.
Below the village, in the steep wooded valley that drops away to the east, runs the track of the North Yorkshire Moors Railway. Levisham railway station sits a mile and a half down a single-track lane from the village itself - a small Edwardian station house and platform restored by the heritage railway, with steam engines pulling carriages of tourists between Pickering and Whitby. The walk from village to station drops through gorse and bracken into the gorge of Newton Dale, where the railway threads along the valley floor. From the village green it is impossible to see the railway at all; the deep cleft of the valley hides everything until you have walked half a mile. Then you turn a corner and there is the steam, drifting up between the trees.
The British television series Heartbeat ran for eighteen seasons through the 1990s and 2000s, set in a fictional moors village in the 1960s. Lisa Kay, who played the district nurse Carol Cassidy in the later seasons, is from Levisham. In April 2021 a more glamorous production arrived: Tom Cruise and the crew of Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One spent several days using the village and the surrounding moor as a location, including some spectacular sequences involving the railway. The village - 70 people on a single street with one pub - briefly hosted hundreds of film crew, security, helicopters, and the rest. Then it all packed up and left, and the sheep went back to grazing, and a hiker on the Tabular Hills Walk crossing the moor above the village now walks through scenery that briefly featured in a blockbuster and somehow looks exactly the same as it always has.
Located at 54.30 N, 0.72 W on the southern edge of the North York Moors National Park, 8 km north of Pickering. The village sits on high ground at the western edge of Newton Dale, a steep wooded valley carved by glacial meltwater. The North Yorkshire Moors Railway runs along the valley floor below. RAF Fylingdales lies 12 km northeast. Nearest civil airport is Teesside International (EGNV), 60 km northwest; Humberside (EGNJ) is 80 km south. Best viewed at 2,000 to 3,500 feet AGL; the village street, the isolated St Mary's Church in its field to the south, and the deep cleft of Newton Dale are the distinctive features.