EXPLORING YORKSHIRE BY RAIL

Pannal is another small village, albeit a bigger one than any of the three on the previous walk. It is located south of Harrogate, of which it is effectively a suburb, albeit one that just about remains detached. Originally named Rossett, it was mentioned in the Doomsday Book of 1086 as Roset and was subsequently located within the now-vanished Forest of Knaresborough, a royal hunting forest that once covered 45 square miles. The village was renamed Pannal (which means “nook

After leaving Horsforth, the train passes through the two-mile long Bramhope Tunnel before making its next stop, and immediately the scenery outside the window becomes strikingly more rural. The first stop is at Weeton Railway Station, which isn’t actually in Weeton at all: it is in neighbouring Huby, a small but ancient village, which lacks a pub, shop or post office, although it did have the last of those until the nineteen nineties. Weeton itself is nearly a mile from the

North Yorkshire was created in 1974, and as well as including most of the North Riding (and some of the East Riding), it includes the top part of the West Riding, except for the Sedbergh Rural District, which ended up in Cumbria, and which we will be visiting later. It also includes the City of York, although York itself was never in any of the three Ridings, instead existing in isolation at their intersection. Unlike South and West Yorkshire, it doesn’t contain any Metropoli