The column finds Sunday lunch at The Wheatsheaf, Borrowby, a just reward after a walk.

A SUPERB pub and a very pleasant Sunday lunch lie at the end of today's column, but since a meal is always better when it's been earned, readers may first care to take another Spring in the step stroll.

If not necessarily circular, the route will be as circuitous as ever.

The Hillside parishes, as now they are known, are dotted either side of the A19 between Northallerton and Thirsk. They are half-hidden little places like Cowesby, Kepwick and Kirby Knowle, mostly just big enough to retain a cricket team if not necessarily 11 able bodied men and to have a house called Hillcrest.

Leake, the hamlet near which the walk began, is also home to the attractive church of St Mary, where the priest-in-charge these past 21 years has been the Rev Patrick Reginald Andrew Reid Hoare, a colourful gentleman who sculpts and rides to hounds and who - since all that's a bit of a mouthful - is known to all comers simply as Toddy.

Leake has a cricket team, too, though we couldn't find the ground. They must have been playing away.

It was the most glorious Sabbath morning, the byways traversed only by agricultural vehicles making hay while the sun shone.

Past a sea of shepherds purse and a pestilence of pylons, always beneath the heaven sent Hambleton hills, we headed down to Knayton, across the A19 and up the hill to Borrowby, where the Wheatsheaf has stood since the 17th century.

Knayton, where the Dog and Gun has a twice weekly Subutteo league - the table football game named after the Latin for hobby hawk; not many people know that - also has two overflowing village notice boards, revealing yet another cat to be absent without leave.

This one's called Roxy, and its owners' e-mail address is slashertasha. It's not the sort of thing to which you'd usually admit, but if the cat's upped and offed then anything else goes, too.

Just east of the village, an ancient and barely legible milestone proclaimed the Manor of Leake. Another nearby was in the Liberty of Brompton.

Borrowby's an even more delightful place, the view from the top of the village said by an ambassador to the court of King Henry VIII to have been without parallel in all Europe.

While His Excellency may never have visited the Scottish Highlands, or even the top of Brusselton Bank, it is possible even for the myopic to see exactly what he meant.

The only strange thing was that the village seemed utterly deserted - as if it were the club trip, or free beer day at the Dog - and the Wheatsheaf little busier.

We knew it 20-odd years ago in Northallerton, when the first born was little - or at least not quite as big as he is now - and would be pushed there, upwardly mobile, in his pram. Even now he blames those dads and lads days for his first sniff of the barmaid's apron.

It's a lovely little pub with a fragrant beer garden to one side, three hand pumps to the fore and a competent kitchen out the back.

The small, square, scatter cushioned bar has lots of copperware hanging from the ceiling, pub games, a coal fire in winter, books on Yorkshire and copies of Ouse Boozer, the CAMRA branch magazine.

Across the corridor there's a pleasantly furnished dining room, at the rear another little parlour where the locals may get out their pipe. (They can't in the dining room, it's non-smoking.) It's been run for a year or so by Paul and Helen Thomas-Peter, a welcoming couple in their first pub.

Sunday lunch is from a longer and more imaginative menu than now is customary - £7 for the main course, £9 two courses, £11 the trio. It seemed to us very good value.

From a main list with six or seven choices, Mr Spratt had pork medallions in a cream and mustard sauce, his piscine missus the poached salmon in a herby butter sauce. Both were fine.

Lots of side dish vegetables included roast potatoes which we thought particularly good and she considered to have been frozen. The two terms are not always synonymous.

We'd started with a fresh and plentiful prawn and avocado salad, the dressing rather too likely to turn litmus red, from a list which included soup of the day, pate and mushrooms on toast with melted Swaledale cheese.

A pint of Daleside, another of Wood's Willow from Shropshire and an outsize treacle sponge completed the exercise before heading back to the Hillside.

It's Mark Twain who is supposed to have said that golf was a good walk spoiled. The Wheatsheaf is a good walk made yet better.

l The Wheatsheaf, Borrowby, near Thirsk (01845 537274). Restaurant open from 5.30-9pm Tuesday to Saturday, and 12.30-3.30pm Sunday. Pub also open Monday evening. A bit tight for the disabled.

NOT knowing its Lear from its Carroll as usual, last week's column supposed that it was the former who wrote of "trulgy woods". It wasn't, it was Lewis Carroll - and the wood was "tulgey", anyway.

SANDERS Yard may not be as well known as Col Sanders, Sanders of the River or Winnie the Pooh - Winnie, it will be recalled, "lived under the name of Sanders" - but is for all that a pleasant little caf in Whitby.

It's on Church Street, jet propelled, veers towards vegetarianism and stops short of it. The meatiest thing on the lunchtime menu may nonetheless be Mr Fortune's kippers, oak smoked in the little place up the street which it always looks like a force four would flatten.

They're served with roast tomatoes and brown bread and butter, £5.95. There are chips with nothing.

The menu also offers a few pounds of mature cheddar - smoked haddock and mature cheddar fishcake, spring vegetable risotto with mature cheddar - huge sandwiches and cauliflower soup.

The soup was perfectly OK, though since cauli is few folks' favourite vegetable, its popularity in liquid form is surprising. The lady of this house in any case insists that the only reason she's not vegetarian is that you can't make a good soup without meat stock.

We sat outside in the yard itself, among the plus points that Whitby's sea birds - inbred for 100 years on a diet of fish, chips and optional mushy peas - are too busy gulling the innocent on the opposite bank.

Around the yard are holiday cottages, at least one of them straining every pinched syllable of estate agency - compact, snug, cosy and so forth - before admitting that the kitchen is unambiguously "tiny". We followed the soup with vegetable chilli tortillas - good chilli, trickier tortillas - with a sour cream dip that was more like a gravy. The Boss reported a "very good" feta cheese, tomato and puy lentil tart and finished with one of those chunks of home made cake which always look so irresistible. So it proved.

The yard's chief advantage, however, is that - surrounded by tall buildings on all sides - it could be almost anywhere, and almost anywhere is better than the centre of Whitby on a deep fried summer Saturday.

THE indispensable Mr Briggs marked his 55th birthday with lunch at the Tapas Bar in Darlington town centre, where they do five or six dishes for two for a total of £9.95. A nice change, too, plus four or five real ales. If only they'd stuff the repetitious Spanish-style music where the Mexicans stuff their enchiladas.

...and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew what fish say when they run up against a concrete wall.

Dam.