Explore Yorkshire: Pubs, Sculpture Parks, and Historic Estates

The wild windswept landscapes and industrial-age towns of Yorkshire, in northeastern England, might seem like an unlikely setting for a cultural and culinary groundswell, but the county is ripe for exploration.

When the good people of Yorkshire call their region “God’s own country,” it conveys several meanings. One carries a hint of pride: these are among the most county-proud citizens in all of England. Another meaning, only slightly contradictory, is gently ironic. The men and women of this sprawling northern county—England’s largest—are known for their self-deprecating humor and love to poke fun at any form of boastfulness, especially their own.

To a visitor like myself, however, the most obvious meaning is rooted in a plain fact. From its deep-green dales to the windswept moors of Brontë country in the South Pennines and the well-ordered Methodist towns of West Yorkshire, this county goes a long way toward justifying its billing.

Bear in mind, this is not Keats’s “beaker full of the warm south.” It is bracing northern beer, and that’s how the locals like it. “The landscape has a strong character, and so does the local accent,” the TV writer Sally Wainwright told me over e-mail. “‘God’s own country’ is kind of a joke, but it’s also a strong identity.”

It was Wainwright who indirectly beckoned me here through my television. On a fine morning last fall just outside Halifax, I found a group of other visitors waiting in line to enter Shibden Hall. This 15th-century estate serves as the setting for a BBC TV series Wainwright created called Gentleman Jack, and it turns out its popularity has led to a small tourist surge.

Gentleman Jack is based on a real person named Anne Lister, who inherited Shibden Hall in the early 1800s. She was a lesbian, and, as her nickname suggests, she didn’t try very hard to hide it. Not for Lister the melancholy vapors of the closet; this is Yorkshire, home of the brave and unabashed. Lister proved a shrewd business owner, not to mention a diligent seductress of local gentlewomen. All this she chronicled in voluminous diaries (rendering the naughty bits in a code of her own devising that was decoded over a century later).

There are more Michelin stars in Yorkshire—five in total—than in any county in the U.K. outside of London.

Even if you’re not a Gentleman Jack fan, Shibden Hall is a worthwhile visit. It’s a fine half-timbered manor with rich paneling and coffered ceilings the color of mink. When she wasn’t pursuing romantic conquests, the real-life Anne Lister was making money, much of which ended up being spent on the house.

As a motivation to hike through Shibden Hall’s extensive parkland, there’s the prospect of enjoying lunch at the Shibden Mill Inn nearby. Like much else in the county, Yorkshire cuisine is hearty, and this pub serves comfort food with particular vigor. My pork chop arrived with gammon crumble, salt-baked carrot, pickled carrot, sticky toffee pudding purée, and cider cream. It was a lot harder waddling back from the pub than it was walking there.

There’s also a connection to Sally Wainwright at Holdsworth House, the hotel I stayed at in Halifax. This handsome Jacobean manor served as a backdrop for an earlier Wainwright TV drama, Last Tango in Halifax. This is not surprising, as the sandstone building dates back to the early 1600s and offers a telegenic setting: the interiors are cozy and woodsy, and the large gardens, adorned with stone ornaments and box hedges, are delightful. As I sat outside in the warm twilight, several young couples walked by on wedding-planning missions. Good luck to them—they picked a splendid place to embark on married life.

Halifax sits at the heart of West Yorkshire, which is what locals call the populous southwestern end of the county. This was once a textile-milling and coal-mining region during England’s 19th-century industrial heyday. A lone smokestack, jutting up like a spire, is often your first view of a village nestled in a West Yorkshire valley.

Those industries are long gone, but they’ve left reminders of a bustling past all over the region. Piece Hall, in the center of Halifax, is where merchants came to trade their woolen goods. Its two levels of colonnaded galleries arranged around a vast open square were recently converted into a hub of pubs, cafés, and shops.

This striking public space, originally built in 1779, manages to look surprisingly modern. Methodism sank deep roots in Yorkshire, and although its stern doctrine wasn’t a lot of fun, its aesthetics have aged well. Minimalist architect John Pawson, who made his name with the old Calvin Klein store on Madison Avenue, grew up nearby. (“Piece Hall is fantastic,” Pawson once told me in an interview, adding that as a child, its straight lines left a lasting impression on him.)

The industry and landscape of Yorkshire have also marked two giants of modern sculpture, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, both of whom were raised here. This lends credence to the county’s claim to be the U.K.’s unofficial sculpture capital—a claim asserted every summer in the joyous festival, the Yorkshire Sculpture International. (Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the event went mostly online for 2020, although many participating venues had reopened by late summer.)

A short drive east from Halifax is the Hepworth Wakefield, a museum that is a true gem. Opened in 2011 and designed by David Chipperfield, it is itself a striking piece of architecture. Inside, you can find the hollowed-out forms Hepworth carved in wood, demonstrating that a sculpture can possess its own organic interior. This innovative idea felt fresh and bold in the 1960s, and it remains so today.

The juxtaposition of modern sculpture and grazing sheep is idyllic—though at times, it can be jarring.

I missed the Henry Moore Institute in nearby Leeds, as I chose to avoid Yorkshire’s biggest city, but I can’t imagine a better setting for Moore’s monumental Reclining Woman than the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, located just outside Wakefield. Scattered across 500 acres of grassland and woodland on the old Bretton Estate, you will find dozens of immense, often startling objects. The contrast between modern sculpture and sheep grazing is picturesque—though occasionally disconcerting. I will not soon forget gazing over the pasture while contemplating the exposed unicorn innards of Damien Hirst’s Myth.

I drove back to Halifax through the village of Hebden Bridge, which has been a magnet for bohemians and hipsters from all over England for quite some time. It’s immediately apparent that this is not your typical serious Yorkshire mill town: window frames and doorways are painted in vibrant colors like blue, orange, green, and purple.

The main street resembles something out of Brooklyn—complete with an artisanal soap maker, a bike shop, and a vegetarian café. Housing here is becoming increasingly pricey. How hip is Hebden Bridge? When the Calder River flooded in 2012, Patti Smith flew in to play a benefit concert at the tiny Trades Club, regarded as one of England’s best music venues.

Just outside of town, a charming gastropub called Stubbing Wharf straddles a sliver of land between the Calder River and the Rochdale Canal. I wanted to stop here for lunch because former poet laureate Ted Hughes, another local son, wrote a dreary poem called Stubbing Wharf about dining here with his wife, the writer Sylvia Plath, during their time living in Hebden Bridge.

“This gloomy memorial of a valley” is what he called the region in his poem, speaking of “a gorge of ruined mills and abandoned chapels.”

That’s not the view from Stubbing Wharf today. Outside, a steady stream of hikers clomped merrily past my table along the canal towpath. The pub’s mammoth portion of fish-and-chips was extraordinary. Plath, though one of the most celebrated female poets of all time, earns scarcely a mention in Hebden’s history. Instead, Hebden Bridge is known as an LGBTQ-friendly town, celebrating its reputation as the lesbian capital of the U.K.

This Scenic New Train Ride Will Take You Past Historic Villages and Through the English Countryside

The area just north of West Yorkshire, where I headed next, looked like a vast, empty green splotch on my Google Map. This is the Yorkshire Dales National Park, a broad expanse of rolling hills and shaded valleys (known locally as dales), interspersed with low stone walls and clear, swift streams. Here, beauty exists in perfect balance—neither too tame nor too savage.

Grantley Hall, located just outside the town of Ripon, lies on the edge of Nidderdale, a corner of the Dales that is so stunning that Her Majesty’s government designated it an AONB, or Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

What is a ha-ha, you might ask? It is a steep drop-off that prevents sheep from wandering up to the front door, designed to be invisible to maintain the view. Of course, if you don’t know it’s there, you may fall in. Ha ha.

Grantley Hall’s current owner, Valeria Sykes, relaunched the stately Palladian mansion as a hotel just last year. Sykes, now 76, grew up as a coal miner’s daughter in Barnsley, located in southern Yorkshire. In 2012, she divorced her exceedingly wealthy husband and reportedly spent $90 million of her settlement restoring Grantley Hall. “I wanted to put Yorkshire on the luxury map,” Sykes declared in a newspaper interview.

I stayed in one of the plush grand suites overlooking the expansive front lawn with its traditional ha-ha. The structure itself shines without much help. Owned and added to by a succession of men skilled at making money and eager to flaunt it, Thomas Norton began the original building around 1710. In 1760, his son Fletcher Norton, an insatiable lawyer known locally as Sir Bullface Doublefee, extended Grantley Hall sideways to better display his wealth.

“It’s all about show—look at me, look at me!” states Anne Harrison, the hotel’s head of guest relations and its unofficial historian. “All the Norton men were unpleasant.”

Portraits of a few of these characters adorn the wall on the way to dinner, alongside the portrait of another strong woman from Yorkshire: Caroline Norton, wife of Fletcher’s even more loathsome grandson George. In 1836, Caroline left George, who then denied her any property or access to their three children. Norton fought back, and her relentless pleas to Parliament eventually led to the passage of significant feminist legislation. Many Englishwomen, including Valeria Sykes, owe her a debt.

The food scene in Yorkshire is vibrant and competitive. There are more Michelin stars here—five in total—than in any other county in the U.K. outside of London. In hiring Shaun Rankin, Grantley Hall clearly aims to enhance Yorkshire’s reputation. (Rankin previously earned a star for Bohemia, on the Channel Island of Jersey.) Rankin intends to source ingredients within 25 miles of the hotel.

This is no tight-knit constraint: Yorkshire’s beef and lamb are renowned, and the region produces an abundance of fresh produce. There are exceptions to Rankin’s rule, of course—Wensleydale, home to one of England’s iconic cheeses, is 35 miles away. But vanilla, which grows in Madagascar, cannot be sourced locally. Rankin, who was raised in North Yorkshire, is familiar with its forests, so he makes his “vanilla” ice cream from a locally available herb called woodruff, which has a similar flavor.

Driving straight east from Ripon, away from the Dales, you cross Dere Street, the modern name for the ancient Roman road that divides Yorkshire lengthwise. On the far side of this thoroughfare, the character of the land changes sharply and quickly. Glades make way for bare, low hills rolling eastward to the North Sea. Before long, you enter the uplands of North York Moors National Park, which in September are covered in a beautiful quilt of purple heather. It’s a sadder, lonelier landscape than the Dales, but equally stunning.

There are many ways to experience this beautiful land, but the quaintest and most romantic must surely be the North Yorkshire Moors Railway. A charitable trust now operates the old steam and diesel trains that make the 18-mile run over the moors from Pickering to Whitby. While it may be nostalgic, I find it hard to resist the delightful clattering of the ancient locomotives—mine was the Repton No. 926 from 1934—or the great plumes of smoke that rise as you arrive at country stations like Goathland, which served as a stand-in for Hogsmeade Station in the Harry Potter movies. More than one grown man let loose a jovial “whoo whoo!” as the Repton 926 blew its steam whistle.

The moors meet the sea at Whitby, where the railroad line concludes. There, I explored the haunting Whitby Abbey, which looms over the town and the gray waves from high on the cliffs. The sight of the roofless nave backlit against low clouds instills an involuntary shudder. The monastery was founded by Abbess Hild in 657, making her perhaps the original eminent Yorkshirewoman, though the Gothic building whose ruins cast their spell today dates from much later.

These ruins left an eerie mark on Bram Stoker, who saw them on a visit in 1890 and set several scenes from his Dracula in the abbey. Therefore, I wasn’t surprised to hear a gentleman in a Victorian bowler hat proclaim, “Dead! And with two small holes in his neck!” They typically host theatrical renditions of Dracula throughout the summer, although performances are currently on hold due to the pandemic. The one I attended last year was quite impressive, too.

It would be difficult to declare a winner in a Dales vs. Moors cook-off. A short distance from the Feversham Arms in Helmsley, where I was staying, are two of Yorkshire’s beloved restaurants. The Star Inn, in Harome, is a cozy, low-ceilinged cottage (when I visited, they were re-thatching the roof).

I first stopped by for a light snack, assuming that since this is Yorkshire, it would be remiss to leave without sampling its namesake pudding. What arrived were three fluffy monsters, each about the size of a grapefruit, accompanied by root vegetables and drenched in hearty gravy. Henceforth, this will serve as the benchmark against which all Yorkshire puddings will be evaluated. The following day, I tried the inn’s signature dish—a layered confection of black pudding, foie gras, and caramelized apple. I could have stopped right there, but, dear reader, I did not.

Dinner at the Black Swan in nearby Oldstead is an even more elaborate affair. Chef Tommy Banks serves up one of those operatic tasting menus where the descriptions are just as important as the actual dishes. It was explained to me that Banks achieves the explosive intensity of his beet salad by dehydrating and then rehydrating the beets before sprinkling them with crumbly frozen goat-milk cheese. I felt a bit bad asking the staff to shorten the menu so my companion wouldn’t miss her train, akin to stopping an opera before the fat lady sings. They were very accommodating, however.

England is so filled with stately homes that I generally sidestepped most of the Yorkshire ones. I made an exception for Castle Howard, and I’m so glad I did. This property, just south of the moors in the Howardian Hills, is truly a stately pile’s stately pile. When a TV or film production needs a grand country seat as a backdrop, they’re very likely to consider Castle Howard. It stood in for Brideshead in the beloved 1981 TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, and I arrived just a month ahead of a film crew from Netflix.

To summarize, the grandeur here—of the house, the park, and the art collection—is even more impressive than is typical for this type of venue. The Howards, or some of them, still reside here in a wing far, far away. Lucky them, you might say? Yes and no. Throughout history, 19 Howards lost their heads on the executioner’s block, which, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, seems more like carelessness than misfortune.

As I made my way back to the Feversham Arms Hotel, rain began to fall. The morning forecast had predicted a chance of a shower at one in three, but the woman at the front desk explained that in Yorkshire, one in three means 90 percent. “Nice weather for ducks,” she commented cheerfully.

Ducks and Yorkshiremen, who rarely let a little rain deter them. I observed that even with the rain pelting down, no one left the hotel’s outdoor pool.

Seeing Yorkshire in Style

Getting There

Manchester is the nearest major airport to Yorkshire; you can change planes in London for the short hop north. The area is also conveniently reachable by train to Halifax, Leeds, or York.

Where to Stay

I adored Grantley Hall (doubles from $488), a converted 17th-century mansion featuring 47 rooms and suites along with a restaurant led by chef Shaun Rankin.

Holdsworth House (doubles from $143) is located on the edge of busy Halifax, yet sitting in the hotel’s Jacobean garden, you’d never know it.

Just outside York, I stayed at the Feversham Arms Hotel (doubles from $158), a stylishly restored former coaching inn in the village of Helmsley.

Where to Eat

At the Shibden Mill Inn (entrées $19–$39), you can enjoy dishes such as duck fat brioche prepared with hen of the woods mushrooms, slow-cooked duck egg, and scallions.

The Stubbing Wharf (entrées $10–$20) is a quaint little pub located on the Rochdale Canal that serves delectable fish and chips. Black Swan at Oldstead (tasting menu $160) has received numerous awards for chef Tommy Banks’s mastery of local produce.

Do not miss the Yorkshire pudding at Andrew Pern’s Michelin-starred Star Inn at Harome (entrées $19–$44).

What to See

The 15th-century estate at Shibden Hall is a must-visit for fans of the TV series Gentleman Jack. The Hepworth Wakefield and Yorkshire Sculpture Park showcase works by local sculpture stars Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.

You’ll encounter haunting ruins at Whitby Abbey and Fountains Abbey, while the North Yorkshire Moors Railway covers one of the most scenic routes in the U.K.