In 2017 I rode to Hessay, a village west of York, to find the Centre of Yorkshire. At the point suggested by the Ordnance Survey as the county’s centroid, all I found was a cowpat.
![](https://e2e.bike/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/YR-Centre-Map3.jpg)
Since then, however, the OS has refined its calculations. It now reckons the exact geographical middle – the point on which a Yorkshire-shaped cardboard cutout would balance, if you could wait long enough for the wind to stop blowing it around – is at BNG 449849.854 454205.65.
![](https://e2e.bike/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/YR-Centre-Map-2.jpg)
Or, as Google Maps would prefer it, 53.981513, -1.241358.
![](https://e2e.bike/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/YR-Centre-Map1.jpg)
Or, as what3words would say, cheese.centrally.salmon.
![](https://e2e.bike/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/YR-Centre-A.jpg)
Whichever way you put it, the CoY is just outside Hessay, off a publicly accessible farm track, about a mile from where I went in 2017.
![](https://e2e.bike/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/YR-Centre-B.jpg)
The Yorkshire Society (which asked the OS for the information in the first place) said they wanted to mark the spot with a plaque, but the only place I could see that you could fix a sign to is a tree a few dozen yards from the centre itself.
![](https://e2e.bike/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/YR-Centre-C-1429x1200.jpg)
You can’t quite get to the point. (Just like those people on trains who talk incessantly to me about themselves; I clearly have a listening face.) It’s a handful of yards inside a field next to that farm track. Handily, there is a white stone almost exactly at the right spot.
![](https://e2e.bike/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/YR-Centre-D2.jpg)
There’s not much to see around here. This is flat farmland in the Vale of York, much of it underwater in this dreary wet weather pattern.
![](https://e2e.bike/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/YR-Centre-D.jpg)
If you venture a mile or two away, though, there are a few things I’ve cycled to in the past that are worth a look. Nun Monkton, with England’s tallest maypole; the site of the historic Battle of Marston Moor; a Silly-Walks-inspired piece of road sign adulteration in Bilton-in-Ainsty.
![](https://e2e.bike/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/YR-Centre-E.jpg)
And there are various other candidates for the ‘Centre of Yorkshire’ which I’ve cycled to, as well. Moor Monkton’s church; Barkston Ash’s ash; Cattal’s pub; Hessay’s cowpat.
![](https://e2e.bike/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/YR-Centre-G-1541x1200.jpg)
But – at least at the time of writing, according to the OS’s latest calculations – the muddy field west of Hessay, possibly marked by a stone possibly not, is the exact centre of Yorkshire, and therefore the exact centre of the civilised world.
![](https://e2e.bike/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/YR-Centre-H.jpg)
I rode home with a big tailwind back to York, stopping off for a bacon roll at the excellent, friendly community cafe in Rufforth, and negotiating fallen trees and flooded towpaths on my journey back home.
![](https://e2e.bike/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/YR-Centre-J.jpg)
I’m not an egotistical person at all. But it was nice to know that, for a few minutes today, I was at the centre not just of my own world, but everyone else’s.