The nearest you can get to Japan in springtime Britain could be Harrogate. Because the Stray – that picnickable green expanse in the heart of the elegant spa town – has two avenues packed with cherry trees. They give you one of the country’s top ten best sakura experiences: a little bit of Kyoto in…
Category: Yorkshire Ridings
Tile Maps Trail 3: Whitby to Middlesbrough
Just two maps left to bag today. But getting from Whitby to the first of them, at Saltburn, was not as easy as the Tile Maps suggest, with their promise of a railway threading a picturesque coastal route all the way. That was one of mass-killer Beeching’s many victims in the 1960s. So I’d have…
Tile Maps Trail 2: Scarborough to Pickering
Ah, Scarbados! Yorkshire’s Blackpool, its national beach resort. A bit cold for a dip today, but there were consolations. A ludicrously long bench. A superb, if frustrating, cycle path. And a Tile Map. The bench first. It’s on Platform 1 of Scarborough station, and ideal for introverts. Because it’s 139m (456ft) long. Two emotionally repressed…
Tile Maps Trail 1: York to Scarborough
I started a three-day trip today, relying for directions on a unique map that’s (a) made of tiles and (b) useless. It’s the mural atlas produced 120 years ago by North Eastern Railways showing their train network in Yorkshire, County Durham and Northumberland. They made 25, nine of which survive in their original locations, six…
Middleton: Steamy experience at world’s oldest railway
Yorkshire is a country – sorry, county – of superlatives. Of stuff that matters, anyway. The best beer, finest scenery, tallest people, most interesting phone boxes, oldest and highest pub. And – I was delighted to learn – the World’s Oldest Working Railway. Because in Hunslet, a suburb of Leeds, there’s been a train running…
Kirkdale: Yorkshire’s secret micro-Minster
Of England’s 32 Minsters, 13 are in Yorkshire. York’s is the best known, biggest, and obviously, best. Ripon and Beverley are familiar too; Hemingborough and Howden less so. Those have been joined in the last thirty years by newly-minsterised churches in Dewsbury, Doncaster, Rotherham, Halifax, Leeds and Hull. I can hear pub quizzers busy scribbling…
Barnsley: All mine
In 1984, Yorkshire had 56 coal mines. By 2015 that figure was zero. Little is left of the industry that defined much of the county’s community life and character, except for one vibrant, enduring legacy: a loathing of Margaret Thatcher and her government. But Barnsley can point to another legacy: Barnsley Main. The old entrance…
Thornborough: Henge fund
In early 2023, the ‘Stonehenge of the North’ was being hyped in the media: a trio of neolithic earthworks by the village of Thornborough, east of Masham, on the flatlands between Yorkshire’s Dales and Moors. I couldn’t resist a folding-bike visit, enabled by the ongoing £2 flat bus fare scheme. The hyping came about because…
Masham: The genuine fake Druid’s Temple
Every list of ‘quirky sights of Yorkshire’ includes the Druid’s Temple, a few miles west of Masham on the edge of the Dales. And every list then quickly stresses that IT’S NOT A REAL DRUIDS’ TEMPLE, but is a folly. It was built not by wise ancients in pointy hats and white robes, but by…
Swanland: Thinking outside the phone box
You know you’re getting old when the Grade II listed buildings are younger than you. And if, like me, you grew up in the East Riding – that flat, quiet, forgotten third of Yorkshire – then you might now be feeling geriatric. Because this very month, nine K8 phone boxes in and around Hull were…