A day in Knaresborough

The day we did  Knaresborough in Yorkshire.

It was the only really sunny day at this end of the back of August and we grabbed the moment.

Now what attracted it to me was not the connection with Mother Shipton who lived in a cave suggested the future and provided the place with a neat tourist attraction, but the market square, castle and railway viaduct.

The market was all that you might expect of a small market town.  There were some picturesque shops and houses by the town cross, including three red telephone boxes which you don’t see back in the city so much and a place to park at reasonable prices.

Hard by was the castle dating from the 13th century taking in commanding views of the river below and the surrounding countryside.

I am drawn to castles.  This one despite being pretty much ruined was the sort I like.  It was small enough to get a sense of what it would have been like to live there.  So from each corner you take in its different features and get something of how closed in its occupants must have felt.

And then there are the views which back in the middle ages made it such an important place.  Anyone on sentry duty would have been for miles and in particular any traffic along the River Nidd which rises in on the Dales at Great Whernside and flows on down to join the River Ouse which in turn flows through York.

Today the Nidd has high water marks of anything between 1.3 metres and 2.36 along its route to the Ouse and while I have no idea how this compares with 700 hundred years ago I guess the river was an important line of communication up from York and so needed to be watched.

But for me the view is compounded by the railway viaduct.  It is a spectacular piece of engineering and like all such constructions seems to hang effortlessly over the valley.

It was finished in 1851 when farmers Higginbotham and Bailey were farming the land which is now the Rec.

So something of a nice connection and something for everyone. Now the castle has been there for hundreds of years the viaduct for just over 160 years and I rather hope the telephone boxes last for a few more decades.

Pictures; Knaresborough, 2015, from the collection of Andrew Simpson