Category: Yorkshire places

Three relaxed days exploring ‘Britain’s first seaside resort’ in the winter sunshine. It boasts Britain’s longest bench, a science pioneer, Yorkshire’s fourth or perhaps sixth largest natural lake, lush ravines, Caribbean beaches and more. Caribbean? Well, the locals call it ‘Scarbados’, among other less complimentary terms (like many British seaside towns, Scarborough has its share…

Filey Brigg is one of Yorkshire’s small-scale geological gems: a natural jetty of rock sticking out into the North Sea which, I was pleased to find, you can cycle along, right to the end. If ‘you’ are Danny Macaskill, anyway. If you’re me, you can cycle halfway along, after which the hitherto flat grassy clifftop…

East, West, Yorkshire’s best. We have everything here, including the very first bit of the Greenwich Prime Meridian: zero longitude, the dividing line between East and West. It makes its first landfall after the North Pole at a caravan park in Tunstall, on the windy Holderness coast. Just a few miles of flat farmland later,…

We all have ups and downs, but a paternoster – half-escalator, half-lift – has both at the same time. Britain now has only two or three working examples of this slow-motion, low-tech version of the Star Trek transporter beam… and one of those is in Sheffield University’s Arts Tower, appropriately the home of their architecture…

Yorkshire. Home of Britain’s best scenery, best beer, best roast dinners, best writers, best cricketers. And, perhaps surprising for some, Britain’s – even the world’s – best library. Sort of. The British Library, at St Pancras in London, is nirvana for researchers. It gives free access to (in principle) every book ever published in the…

‘Norber Erratics’. Jazzband collective? Invitation cricket touring XI? No, another Yorkshire scenic gem: strange rock formations in Three Peaks country, near Ingleborough. Huge sandstone rocks balance precariously on narrow limestone props, as if positioned by some award-winning outdoors sculptor. The sandstone blocks are ‘erratics’: intruders, deposited by glaciers long long ago, before the internet, before…

England’s highest motorway; Britain’s biggest single-arch bridge; Europe’s deepest roadway cutting; a farm stranded in the middle of the M62. Welcome to Dean Head. It may sound like a 1980s Aussie cricketer – father, perhaps, of Travis – but for civil engineers this is one of Yorkshire’s most renowned places. It’s up in the Pennines…

Torpenhow Hill in Lancashire is sometimes said to the most redundantly named thing in Britain, because all four elements (tor, pen, how, hill) mean ‘hill’. But anything Lancashire can do, Yorkshire can do better. Lake Semerwater, just south of Bainbridge in Wensleydale, also has a quadruple name: ‘lake-sea-mere-water’, each element meaning exactly (or to be…

Jeremy Clarkson calls Buttertubs Pass one of his favourite roads, but that won’t put me off. Because Buttertubs is, indeed, one of Yorkshire’s most impressive cycling experiences. And therefore England’s. And arguably the world’s, though you’d have to be very argumentative to go that far. The road scrambles its way north from Hawes in Wensleydale…

Both the 1980s and 2020s TV settings of All Creatures Great and Small, James Herriot’s heartwarming tales of a vet’s life in mid-1900s Yorkshire, were shot mainly in Askrigg and the Dales. But Herriot himself – real name Alf Wight – in fact lived and practised in Thirsk. Nothing about the town is familiar to…