Begin your tour at Skipton Town Hall on the High Street and walk a circular route through the historic core of the town, returning to the same point.
From the Town Hall, walk up the medieval High Street to Skipton Castle, then across to Holy Trinity Church. Descend to High Corn Mill on Eller Beck, join the Springs Canal, and follow it to the Leeds and Liverpool Canal basin, returning via Victoria Street and Sheep Street to the Town Hall.
Learn about the High Street, one of the best-preserved medieval market street layouts in England. The width, the curve, and the way the buildings step back all reflect a street laid out in the thirteenth century. Skipton received its market charter from King John in 1204, and the four-day-a-week market that fills it today is the direct descendant of that grant. Learn to read the burgage plots, the narrow medieval landholdings still visible in the building frontages.
See Skipton Castle, one of the most complete medieval castles in England. Established around 1090 in the aftermath of William I's Harrying of the North, it was rebuilt in stone from 1310 by Robert de Clifford, who died at Bannockburn before the work was finished. Held by the Clifford family for over four centuries, through the Wars of the Roses and a three-year Civil War siege that made Skipton the last Royalist stronghold in northern England. Restored afterwards by Lady Anne Clifford, one of the most remarkable women in English history, who spent thirty years fighting through the courts for her inheritance and then rebuilt everything Cromwell had pulled down.
Visit Holy Trinity Church, fourteenth century in origin and the burial place of the Clifford family, moved here after Henry VIII dissolved Bolton Priory in 1539. Castle and church stand together at the head of the town, which is not a coincidence: they represent the two powers that governed everyone's life.
See High Corn Mill. There has been a working water mill on this site on Eller Beck since 1310, owned by the same Robert de Clifford who was rebuilding the castle in stone. Water was the industrial technology of the pre-modern world, and the beck still does useful work today, driving a turbine that feeds electricity into the National Grid.
Learn about the Springs Canal, barely a third of a mile long and built to carry limestone from the quarries above the town directly onto waiting boats. It joins the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, one of the most ambitious engineering projects of the eighteenth century. When the first boats reached Skipton in April 1773 carrying coal, the price halved overnight. A town hemmed in by the Pennines became part of a national trade network in a single stroke.
The return leg takes in the narrower streets behind the High Street, where the medieval pattern of yards and passages is still legible, and where the town's Victorian expansion becomes obvious in the building stock.
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