The English Administrative County of North Yorkshire

Population and area summary of the County of North Yorkshire

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The County of North Yorkshire is located in The Northern Counties of England, it covers an administrative area of 8,038Km² and in 2001 was home to a population of 569,660 persons, that represents 1.16% of that of England and 0.01% of the population of the entire United Kingdom.

More detailed information including visitor attractions and event venues in North Yorkshire is available on this site by following the links below to the Boroughs and/or Districts or follow this link to select a different County.

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Boroughs/Districts of the County of North Yorkshire

Unitary Authorities and Metropolitan Areas are shown below as these locations are historically associated with this county. These areas today are self-governing and are no longer responsible to the County Administration.

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Historical notes about The English Administrative County of North Yorkshire

NORTH YORKSHIRE in 1950

North Yorkshire covering the Cleveland Hills and the moors, the city of York, Middlesbrough (by far the largest town), and Scarborough.

To understand the significance of the great Plain of York which, lying between the vast rigid block of the Pennines and the tableland of the moors of the north-east, divides Yorkshire into two halves, it is necessary to glance back for a moment to the Ice Age in what has been termed "our geological yesterday" when the mighty ice-flows from the north poured down upon Yorkshire. One vast sheet of ice flowed from the Scottish mountains, choking the Irish Sea and submerging the peaks of the Isle of Man, and found an escape through the Eden valley where it was reinforced by glaciers from the Lake District. It pressed across the Pennines where is now Stainmore and flowed down the valley of the Tees.

At the same time the North Sea was similarly choked by ice from the Scandinavian glaciers and pressed back against the ice flow from the west, closing the way out for the ice from Stainmore. Thus under the double stress of the flow from the Pennines and the counter-thrust from the North Sea a great sheet of ice was diverted as one gigantic glacier down the vales of Mowbray and York and so into the valley of the Trent.

But that is not the end of the story. As time passed and the ice melted and retreated it left in its wake a great swamp or morass stretching ultimately from near Northallerton to south Yorkshire, a morass which existed in many places until the eighteenth century and lingers today in Askham Bog, Strensall Common, Skipworth Common and Thorne Waste. This extensive swamp was an almost impenetrable barrier between the highlands on either side of it and for long divided the halves of Yorkshire. It was crossed only places where the retreating glacier had left high ridges of clay and gravel across the morass - what the geologists term moraines. Both of these are conspicuous today, one traversing the Vale of York from Stamford Bridge through Escrick to the Wharfe at Ulleskelf, the other from the same starting point to Tadcaster. These higher ridges became causeways above the swamp level, being linked eventually with the Aire Gap already referred to, and acting as trade routes and cultural arteries between one half of the county and the other.

Today the extensive Plain of York is, largely as a result of its earlier ice visitation, among the most fertile in Yorkshire and the most prosperous. Where the dalesman talks of sheep and walls the plainsman talks of corn and cows and with justification. These low flat lands have a rich soil, a mild climate and a rainfall half that of the sodden fells to the west. The drained swampland has come highly prized as pasture and arable.

As you look down on this fertile plain from Sutton Bank on the Hambledon Hills or across it from the tower of York Minster (that venerable and most venerated of all buildings in Yorkshire), you have a picture of a very different Yorkshire from the rest, a picture to confound the Southerner whose notion of the county is a hotch-potch of gritty hills, mill chimneys and pit-head gear. Here are woodlands and mansions in fair parks, exquisite little church spires and towers, prosperous market towns like Thirsk and Ripon and Boroughbridge with their butt crosses, Georgian houses and coaching inns, cathedral cities like York itself and Ripon and older ecclesiastical foundations like Byland Abbey, Newburgh Priory and Kirkham Abbey and on its fringe the lovely Fountains Abbey, set in magnificent parkland. As a background to all this are the farms and nursery gardens, the stables of the horse breeders and trainers, the little rural industries and the annual country fairs.

The Great North road runs north and south through the length of the Plain, and an atmosphere of coaching days still lingers round the towns along its course. Legends of highwaymen are still told of its heaths and inns. For a spell, in the railway days, grass grew in the streets of some of those towns and even on the Great North Road itself, but the motorcar has brought a new activity and a new prosperity. The old inns are now often roadhouses, the stables have become garages, village greens are parking grounds, and lorry drivers' all-night cafes are sprinkled along its edges.

But the plain itself remains a fat land, watered by the Ouse, and offering vistas more frequently associated with the southern half of England. The ancient city of York in its midst, redolent of history and tradition, keeps a fatherly and ecclesiastical eye upon its people and as the Ouse gathers its tribute from nearly all the rivers of Yorkshire so York, as the seat of the episcopal ruler of the north, gathers reverence from all the county.

As the Pennine fells form a mighty mass to the west of the York Plain so the high land to the east, the moorland area of Yorkshire, forms a clear natural division with its won special features and well-defined boundaries. It is a broad tableland which rises to no greater height than one thousand five hundred feet above the sea and stretches from the Vale of Pickering and the Plain of York to Cleveland and the Tees estuary. To the east the tableland runs close up to the coast, terminating in the noble sea cliffs which stretch from Saltburn to Scarborough. Within these boundaries there are between three hundred and four hundred square miles of land, practically all heather-clad, the home of the moorland folk.

It is sparsely populated area, for these moorland heights do not offer fat livings. The scattered farmsteads have a long family tradition behind them, and in some of them the sweet-smelling peat and turf fires have never been out for a century or more and the tools and implements in use are almost archaic. It is a hard unending struggle to wring a living from these moors, where communications are still difficult and visitors rare save in the few summer months. The struggle has produced a race apart, with its own speech and customs, its folklore and superstitions, and its odd survivals from a previous age, like the annual Plough Stots dance at Goathland which celebrates the day on which the plough was put into the ground after the Deluge.

Famous hunting packs can be found in this country, the Sinnington, Goathland, Bilsdale and Staintondale among them, which have their origins far back in history and which have produced a host of famous sporting characters. So closely, indeed, is hunting linked with the life of the area that up to quite recently local hunt fixtures were given out among the Sunday notices in many churches. Cleveland horses are noted and horse and hounds form the staple of talk in village inns and at the weekly markets.

This is the coloured corner of Yorkshire where the artist can be lavish with his palette. The roads are red, the bracken covered slopes deep green or gold, according to the season, the miles of heather a sea of purple in autumn, and even the rocks and shales vary from bright red to a lustrous blue. The farmsteads and houses are colourful, too, and over all is the patina of a mellow age, for modernity has in general not entered here. Indeed, more than in any other part of Yorkshire superstition lingers here, with ancient ways and speech that remains unaltered.

An old shepherd summed it up when he said, "There be things as never change. Things ‘as been done and said syne men lived on the moor that be done and said still the same. There's customs that'll never die as long as the Hand of Glory's among us." And he explained that the Hand of Glory was "the hand of a ‘ooman burned for a witch that is a safeguard agen devils, smallpox, misfortune and death. But it only acts for the innercent." Stories of witches and goblins and familiar spirits still linger, though, for the most part, these supernatural folk appear to be friendly or at worst a provocative company.

One of the familiar spirits of Farndale in the centre of these moors was known locally as Hob o' th' Hurst who played many demonic tricks on a moorland farmer. To rid himself of the spirit he decided to remove to another farm. He procured his place and set off with his furniture and implements. On the way he met an acquaintance who remarked in the obvious manner of a friend, "Ah see thoo's flittin'." A deep voice came from the recesses of the milk churn on the cart, "Ay, we's flittin'." Where upon the troubled farmer turned his cart about. "Ey, if thoo's theer too," he said "we may as well gan yam agean" (go home again.)

Life of the Moorland People

There are no large towns on these moors and the largest villages house no more than a few hundred families. Contact with the larger world tends to find outlet on the one side with the little towns of Yarm, Thirsk, Helmsley, Kirby Moorside and Pickering on the fringe of the Plain of York and on the other with the coast towns and villages of Redcar and Staithes, Whitby and Scarborough. Here and there modernity seeks to creep in, but only on the fringes, and even that is steadily assimilated into the ancient simple life of the moorland folk.

The older towns of Yorkshire, like York and Richmond and Ripon, are full of history and in them thought inevitably turns to the past. But the coastal towns - with a few exceptions - are cities of the future rather than of the past. Their history, though notable, is the least part of them, and having a less glorious past to trade upon it is to the future they look.

Like all Britain's North Sea coast, the long line which runs between Spurn Head in the south and Redcar in the north had its historic moments. The Norsemen landed on this coast. There were Roman signal stations along it. Henry of Hereford (later Henry IV) made Hull his port of entry. Queen Henrietta Maria landed at Bridlington with weapons bought by the sale of the Crown Jewels of England to fight the Parliamentarians - it required five hundred carts to carry all her impedimenta to York. Whitby's famous Abbey marks the early years of monasticism in England and gave us in the person of Caedmon, a stable servant at the monastery, the first of our great English poets. Whitby itself was once the fourth port of England. Scarborough Castle played its part in the Parliamentary War.

Despite all that and much more the Yorkshire coastline is today less a line of history than a vast playground for the rest of the county. To this magic pleasure-ground, almost all of which from Tees mouth to Humber estuary is easily accessible, come the majority of the families of Yorkshire for their annual holiday - the wool-men, the men of the pits and the tradesmen and office workers. Once quiet sleepy little fishing villages and towns have in the past century awakened to a new fame and glory and a new ugliness. Old crafts and trades have vanished or have been called upon to give a new allegiance to the crowds which flock to the sands and cliffs and spas. Former lordly mansions are popular hotels or holiday centres. Here each summer is spent much of the money accumulated during the year in the old and new industries of the rest of Yorkshire. The hand of modernity, sometimes in garish form, has this strip of Yorkshire in a strong grasp. Yet even so the old and mellowed can sometimes be seen between the fingers.

Blending of Ancient and Modern

In Scarborough old and new are wonderfully mixed. It has cinemas, motorboats, speedboats, sailing-boats and a Spa where iron and magnesia waters are disguised with fruit juices, a gabled stone house where King Richard III once stayed, an ancient smuggling inn which boasts a ghost, and also on show a giant tunny fish or a baby seal caught in the bay. Even the museum displays side by side with early British urns and skeleton pieces of shell fired at the town by the German warships during the First World War.

Every town and village along the Yorkshire coast has, beside its more popular holiday streets, its old and quaint, yet colourful clusters of cottages, the homes still of successors of the men who built them, a distinctive race of men owing less allegiance to Yorkshire than to the sea whence comes their livelihood. They are often dour, close-lipped and close-fisted, still a little suspicious of strangers save as customers for their fish or patrons of their boats, superstitions and rough. Yet they show skill and bravery, and there are in-numerable stories of stirring journeys in their little cobbles or in the lifeboat to assist the crews of unlucky ships caught in the terrific storm waters along the coast.

When the holiday-makers depart at the end of the summer these men return to their ancient craft, no longer what it once was yet still important, and go out with their nets and their lobster and crab pots into the grim seas.