Dog-friendly Staveley

A family-run country pub on Staveley's main street, serving hearty home-cooked food from local produce since 1999 beside log fires and shabby-chic furniture. The pub describes itself as dog-friendly throughout, with a dog-friendly beer garden hidden at the back complete with a wood-fired pizza oven. The wetland nature reserve on the northern edge of the village is a ten-minute walk away.

A flat three-mile hour-and-a-quarter circuit of the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust's 79-hectare wetland reserve, built on old gravel workings, with barely 10 metres of height change and a network of surfaced paths that take a buggy or a wheelchair and stay usable in midwinter. The car park on Minskip Road takes a dozen cars, with disabled parking off Main Street through a radar-key gate by the church, and the reserve sits ten minutes from the A1(M) south-west of Boroughbridge. Highland cattle and Hebridean sheep graze here all year, so dogs must be on a lead on every path, and they are not allowed in the largest hide; the lagoons draw bitterns and marsh harriers, so keep the noise down.

A small dog-friendly campsite behind the Royal Oak in Staveley, with electric hook-ups and fresh water and a flat fee per caravan. Dogs are welcome across the site, and the pub's bar, garden and kitchen are a few steps from your pitch. A quiet base for the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust reserve and the lanes towards Boroughbridge and Knaresborough.