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Grassington did not become Darrowby by accident. The production team for the Channel 5All Creatures Great and Small searched extensively for a filming base — a Dales village with the right cobblestones, the right scale, the right period atmosphere — and Grassington was the answer they arrived at.
It is worth understanding why, because understanding why the village works as Darrowby tells you something about both the series and the place.
Grassington is a market town in upper Wharfedale, roughly in the middle of the Yorkshire Dales National Park. It has a cobbled market square, Georgian limestone buildings, independent shops and cafés, and a National Park centre that covers the surrounding landscape. The population is modest — a few hundred permanent residents — but the visitor numbers are substantially larger, partly because of its central position in the Dales and increasingly because of All Creatures.
The town received its market charter in the 13th century and has been a commercial centre for upper Wharfedale since the medieval period. It has not changed its fundamental character in the intervening centuries — the market square is still the market square, the lanes still run in the same directions — which is precisely why it works as a period filming location.
The original Darrowby — James Herriot's fictional version of Thirsk — is described in the books as a market town of two thousand or so people, set in a broad valley with fells visible beyond it. Grassington is smaller than this, but its proportions — the enclosed square, the way the streets lead off it, the relationship between the built environment and the surrounding landscape — produce the feeling Herriot was describing. The production team dressed the square and the adjacent streets to represent a market town of the 1930s and early 1940s, and the bones of the place held the dressing perfectly.
Most of the exterior Darrowby scenes in the series are recognisable on foot in Grassington. The square, the lane where Skeldale House sits, the route James walks on his way to a call, the corner where he encounters Tristan — these are all there, unchanged from the screen.
The National Park centre in the village has a map of the general filming area, and most fans have done enough research before arriving to know roughly where to look. The discovery of specific locations — the doorway, the cobblestone, the roofline — as you walk the streets is one of the quiet pleasures of the day.
Grassington is worth spending time in for its own sake. The surrounding Wharfedale landscape — the limestone walls running up the fellside, the traditional field barns, the river in the valley below — is the landscape that appears throughout the series and that the story is rooted in. The village is also the starting point for walks into the lead mining landscape on the moors above, which is some of the finest industrial heritage scenery in the Dales.
The pubs and cafés in Grassington are good. The square on a market day has the busy, purposeful quality of a place that has been doing commerce here for eight hundred years.
Grassington is the first major stop on our All Creatures Great & Small tour, with the filming locations explored in depth using live scene technology.