Few visitors pass through Yorkshire , England's largest
county, without spending time in history-soaked York , for
centuries England's second city. Famed primarily for its minster,
the city is a comprehensive ensemble of medieval alleys, castle
ruins, tucked-away churches, riverside gardens and topnotch
museums. York's mixture of medieval, Georgian and Victorian
architecture is mirrored in miniature in the prosperous north and
east of the county by towns such as Beverley , centred on
another soaring minster; Richmond , banked under a
crag-bound castle; and Ripon , gathered around its
honey-stoned cathedral. Knaresborough shares similar
attributes, but is overshadowed by the faded spa-town gentility of
neighbouring Harrogate . The Yorkshire coast, too, retains
something of the grandeur of the days when its towns were the first
to promote themselves as resorts: places such as Bridlington
and Scarborough boomed in the nineteenth century and again
in the postwar period, though the best of the Yorkshire coast is
found in characterful, historic places such as Whitby and
Robin Hood's Bay .
The engine of growth during the Industrial Revolution was not in
the north of the county, but in the south and west. By the
nineteenth century, Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield and their satellites
were the world's mightiest producers of textiles and
steel . Ruthless economic logic left some of the cities
battered by depression in the later years of the twentieth century,
though a millennium vigour has infused South and West Yorkshire.
The city-centre transformations of Leeds and
Sheffield in particular have been remarkable, both now
featuring a series of high-profile attractions, while
Bradford and its National Museum of Photography, Film and
Television waylays people on their way to Haworth -
birthplace of the Brontë sisters.
During even the worst of times, broad swathes of moorland
survived above the slum- and factory-choked valleys. The
Yorkshire Dales , to the northwest, form a lovely patchwork
of limestone hills and serene valleys, ranging from the gentle,
grassy spans of Wharfedale and Wensleydale to the
majestic heights of Ingleborough, Whernside and Pen-y-ghent, and
the wilder valleys of Swaledale, Dentdale, Ribblesdale and
Malhamdale . Less visited, but still worth as much time as
you can spare, is the county's other National Park, the North
York Moors , divided into bleak upland moors and with a
tremendous rugged coastline.
The region is also scattered with a host of historic sites and
buildings. The stately home of Castle Howard stands out, but
there are also imperious relics of the Industrial Revolution,
notably the Italianate pastiche of Saltaire , a millworkers'
village on the outskirts of Bradford. In an earlier age, before the
Reformation, Yorkshire had more monastic houses than any other
English county, centres not only of religious retreat but also of a
commercial acumen that was to lay the foundations of the region's
great woollen industry. Many beautifully situated monastic
ruins survive today at Fountains, Rievaulx, Bolton Abbey,
Whitby and elsewhere, graceful counterpoints to the more solid
remains of the castles at York, Richmond, Scarborough and
Pickering - the foremost of more than twenty castles raised in
Yorkshire by the Normans.