Category: Yorkshire places

Yorkshire’s Holderness coast is one of the strangest places to cycle in Britain. I spent today wandering the lanes round Skipsea (pic), south of Bridlington. Many old people – in other words, me – remember when these linked up with roads running along the clifftop. I cycled along them thirty years ago on my Raleigh…

Yorkshire reckons it’s got the best of everything. All the stuff that counts anyway. France may do better philosophy, Germany engineering, and the Philippines know how to do nail bars. But for the best cricket, the best beer, the best scenery, the best people… well, it’s got to be the broad acres. (There are famously…

Beverley (picture), at the edge of the gentle Wolds, is one of our great secrets: a fine, characterful Georgian market town with its own brand of Yorkshireness. While it has plenty in common with the county’s other market towns such as Richmond – a fondness for turning potentially pedestrianised-showcase market squares into car parks, for…

A key to understanding Yorkshire is that nothing else, anywhere, will ever be as good as it is in God’s Own Country. (That’s what Yorkshire people call Yorkshire. It’s not what God calls it, but obviously His opinion doesn’t count as much as, say, Fred Trueman’s.) Think, for example, of the farmer whose land straddled…

The most literary place in the world is an old vicarage in Haworth. Many countries in the world are proud enough to boast one major author. Well, this West Yorkshire village boasts three: in the 1840s, the parsonage was home to Emily, Anne and Charlotte Brontë. Which means this one building (pop. 6) has produced…