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Grassington sits above the River Wharfe in Upper Wharfedale at a height of two hundred metres, and it has the quality that the best Dales villages share: it looks as though it was made for exactly the size it is. The cobbled market square, the Georgian houses in pale Dales limestone, the alleyways running off between the buildings — nothing is out of scale and nothing was built for anyone's benefit but the people who lived here.
It is also, increasingly, one of the best-known villages in the Dales, partly as a result of being the principal filming location for All Creatures Great and Small, the television adaptation of James Herriot's veterinary memoirs. The market square, the alleyways and several of the surrounding buildings have appeared repeatedly in the series. On busy weekends, fans of the programme make a significant proportion of the visitors.
The cobbled market square at the centre of Grassington has been the commercial and social heart of the village since at least the medieval period, when a weekly market was held here. The square is surrounded by stone buildings of various periods — some Georgian, some earlier — with the Devonshire Arms (an old coaching inn) and various shops, cafés and galleries.
The National Park Centre for the northern Dales is just off the square. It has maps, walking information and a good overview of the surrounding landscape.
James Herriot — the pen name of James Alfred Wight, a Yorkshire veterinary surgeon — wrote six autobiographical novels between 1970 and 1992 about his experiences as a country vet in the Yorkshire Dales in the 1930s and 40s. The novels were adapted for television twice — once in the 1970s and again in the 2020 Channel 5/PBS series that has since attracted a large international following.
The 2020 series uses Grassington extensively as the stand-in for Herriot's fictional town of Darrowby. The market square, the alleyways and various buildings appear in almost every episode. Walking through Grassington on a quiet morning, with the filming locations mapped against your memory of particular scenes, is one of the more pleasurable exercises in literary-geographical detective work available in the Dales.
The valley above and below Grassington is one of the finest sections of Wharfedale. Below the village, the river runs through limestone gorges and woodland to Bolton Abbey (approximately eight miles). Above, the valley narrows and the character becomes more open and upland — limestone pavements, dry stone walls, the long ridgeline of Great Whernside above Kettlewell.
A two-mile walk upstream from Grassington reaches Linton, a small village around a village green with a packhorse bridge over the Wharfe that is one of the finest small bridges in the Dales. Linton waterfall, at the point where a tributary joins the Wharfe, is small but worth seeing after rain.
The moors above Grassington were intensively lead-mined from at least the Roman period until the late 19th century. The landscape above the village — the Duke's New Road, the old smelt mill, the hushes and rakes (channels cut into the hillside to expose ore) — is one of the most complete lead-mining landscapes in the Yorkshire Dales. It is not immediately obvious to the untrained eye, but your expert storyteller on a bespoke Dales tour will point out what you are looking at and explain the industry that shaped the upper Wharfedale economy for centuries.
Grassington and the surrounding Wharfedale landscape can be included in a bespoke Yorkshire Dales tour. Contact us to discuss a bespoke day.