The young James Cook would have seen the view of the village as drawn by George Cuit about 1788. Many aspects of the view are little changed since Cook’s time. This cannot be said of All Saint’s Church where the 15th century tower was replaced by a simpler structure in 1788 which was then demolished in 1880 with the stone being used to build a wall around the graveyard. At the same time the length of the nave was reduced by half; this was at the time Christ Church was completed on Guisborough Road. Parts of All Saints’ date from the Normans, such as the entrance into the nave, although there is evidence of a prior Saxon church. Captain Cook’s mother and some of his siblings are buried in the churchyard. The inscription on the headstone claims that Cook was killed at Owhyhee on 14 December 1779, but should read 14 February 1779.

The view of Roseberry Topping changed in 1912 when a rockfall produced the ‘Matterhorn’ profile seen today. Previously the hill had been likened to a volcano, Cleveland’s ‘Vesuvius’. Roseberry Topping certainly was never a volcano but is an ‘outlier’, separated from the nearby high ground by erosion. The Topping’s geology, with a hard sandstone cap, is identical to the adjacent moorland.

The path on either side of the footbridge at the bottom end of Low Green is paved with whinstone setts. The extraction of whinstone, a hard volcanic rock, was an important industry in the village for centuries. Further down Yarm Lane, the wooden-slatted drying shed of Jackson’s Tannery can be seen. It is all that remains of Great Ayton’s once-extensive leather tanning industry.