IF you are flush with cash, this curious little property with glorious views in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales may be of interest when it comes up for auction next week.

And you could move in immediately – it has no chain.

It is an outside toilet, overlooking Aysgarth Falls.

Offers over £8,000 are invited for this loo with a view in Wensleydale. It has riparian rights which allow its riverbank owner to fish in the Ure.

It was one of three privies that used to be attached to the mid 19th Century Mill Cottages on the road behind it – if you were caught short in the middle of the night, you’d have to dash out in your nightdress, cross the road, climb down the steps in the complete darkness before finding relief in the toilet.

The cottages themselves were attached to nearby Yore Mill, which towers over the Yore Bridge that carries the road over the River Ure.

The first Yore Mill, powered by the river, in medieval times was a fulling mill. Fulling is where the cloth – usually wool – is beaten so that it becomes clean and thicker. Often this was done by people – whose surnames became either fuller or walker – walking on it. A fulling mill rendered the walkers redundant as they were replaced by water-driven, wooden fulling hammers.

The fulling mill was replaced in 1784 by a cotton mill, financed by the Birkbeck family of Settle, but it burned down in 1853. The mill was rebuilt the following year, to spin cotton and grind corn, and it operated until 1958, so it was those millworkers who would have lived in Mill Cottages and whose bottoms would have graced the outside toilets.

“The purchaser wants to be someone with a vision of what you could do with it,” says Sarah Sykes, of agents Robin Jessop who are selling the toilet by auction on April 10. “Depending on what the planners say, you could make it into a little artist studio, or it could be a photographer’s dream, or it could just be a little area for your deckchair where you sit and enjoy the views – it could be like a beach hut only overlooking the river.”

The natural view of the Ure rushing over the limestone steps would obviously be the main gaze. It is a view which has appealed to Ruskin, Turner and Wordsworth, and even to the film-makers of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

Bulmer’s Yorkshire directory of 1890 said Aysgarth had “one of the most beautiful waterfalls in England, and the great attraction of the district. Here for the distance of about half a mile the Yore flows, or rather rushes, in the wildest confusion over a broken bed of grey limestone, forming two picturesque cascades, one above, the other below the bridge”.

This hints that there is history to contemplate from your toilet seat. You will be able to see Yore Bridge, built in 1539 with a single span 71ft wide which is 32ft above the riverbed, and you will be able to imagine in the trees beyond the running of the railway.

The North Eastern Railway extended down the dale from Leyburn to Hawes in 1878, and it ran until 1954.

Aysgarth station was near the falls, and in 1904 it was a one hour 21 minute ride from Northallerton. In the years before the First World War, the railway brought 70,000 tourists annually to see the wonders of Wensleydale.

That must have been good for the dale’s economy, but the railways also contributed to the dale’s decline. They offered rural inhabitants a glimpse of the world outside their dale, and enabled them to move out easily. They also brought in cheap mass-produced goods which did for the local artisans, like those employed in the mill.

The toilet is to be auctioned at 6pm on April 10 at Allerton Court Hotel in Northallerton. How much would you pay to spend a penny there, to be able to tinkle at Aysgarth Falls?