Ilkley

Two thousand years of settlement

The Romans arrived at Ilkley around 79 AD and built a fort they called Olicana. They chose the spot deliberately. Ilkley sits at a natural crossing of the River Wharfe, where routes converged from Catterick to the north, York to the east, Skipton to the west and Manchester over the Pennines. Control the crossing and you control the movement.

The fort went through several rebuildings over more than two centuries. Its most remarkable survival is the Verbeia Stone, a gritstone altar dedicated to Verbeia, the Romano-British goddess of the River Wharfe, shown holding a snake in each hand. It is a reminder that Roman religion in Britain absorbed local deities rather than replacing them.

The settlement recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 appears as Illicleia. For centuries afterwards Ilkley remained modest, a scattering of farmhouses beneath the moor.

The town that water built

Everything changed in the nineteenth century. Ilkley reinvented itself as a spa town built on hydropathy, the belief that cold water treatment could cure almost any ailment.

White Wells, the whitewashed cottage visible from the town on the edge of the moor, was the original bathhouse, built in the late 1700s. Victorian visitors were carried up to it on donkeys to plunge into freezing spring water. By the 1850s grand hydropathic hotels had opened across the hillside and Ilkley had become a fashionable destination.

One visitor in the autumn of 1859 was Charles Darwin, who came to take the water cure while awaiting the publication of On the Origin of Species. By his own account he was glad of the distraction.

The Victorian town

The architecture tells you when Ilkley became prosperous. The large stone villas, the wide streets, the railway station and the civic buildings are almost all Victorian or Edwardian, built on spa money and the arrival of the railway in 1865.

Walking the town, you can read the transition from farming village to health resort to commuter town in the buildings themselves.

What you will see

We walk the town centre and its Victorian architecture, visit the site of the Roman fort, see the parish church and the surviving Anglo-Saxon crosses, then climb to White Wells for the view back down the Wharfe valley. Along the way we cover the etymology of the town, the story of the water cure, and how a Pennine village became one of Yorkshire's most desirable addresses.