Heritage Sites

Tell-tale signs of a rich and varied history are scattered across North Yorkshire.

Index
Heritage Sites

Some stand dominant over landscape or look out over the sea, while others are tucked away, hidden treasures waiting to be discovered.

Across the Yorkshire Dales some industrial workings and landscapes have been reabsorbed into the rural landscape since their abandonment. These heritage sites and buildings are the remains, sometimes barely visible, of the human activity that has marked our landscape over the centuries, at times utterly dominating it.

While often hugely destructive, this activity helped make North Yorkshire a bustling hub of the Industrial Revolution. It created towns and villages, pubs, and marketplaces that you can enjoy during your visit.

Now that the furnaces are cold, the flues collapsed, and the mills have gone quiet, nature has reclaimed the buildings and spoil heaps. These once intensive mineral industries have all become places for discovery, exploration and imagination in their modern day form.

Further back in time some of the sites in North Yorkshire are military keeps and castles, with their own stories of long held sieges, captive royals and murderous knights. Whether still standing and maintained, or a footprint of foundations denoted by a few remaining walls they are a place to imagine another very different time of knights and honour.

One more curious echo of the past which you will find across North Yorkshire is the folly, a purely decorative structure or building erected in the style of an older ruin to add grandeur to gardens or land.

Many of North Yorkshire’s follies have now become historically significant themselves. They may not be the medieval site, the prehistoric rock circle, or the forgotten fort they pretend to be, but they tell a different story of status, power and often charity as building them provided work when there was none.