EXPLORING YORKSHIRE BY RAIL

Hornbeam Park is a small, primarily industrial, suburb of Harrogate that was originally home to companies including Imperial Chemical Industries, who invented Crimplene in their laboratories on the site and named it after the nearby Crimple Valley. It was developed as an office park and retains many offices, but is now also home to Harrogate College (a campus of Hull University) and retail premises. A small industrial estate may not sound like an appealing place for a walk, b

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