Things to Do in North Yorkshire, area by area

A Baroque palace with a painted dome, a Hawksmoor mausoleum and a thousand acres of designed landscape — the grandest house in Yorkshire and the one that turned into Brideshead on screen.

The last standing piece of York Castle, a thirteenth-century quatrefoil keep on a Norman motte — reopened in 2022 with a roof deck that puts the whole city at your feet.

Skeletal gothic arches on a North Sea headland, above the 199 Steps — the monastery of Hild and Caedmon, and the silhouette that gave Bram Stoker his Dracula.

One of the most complete medieval castles in England — roofed, floored and walkable from dungeon to watchtower, with Lady Anne Clifford's 1659 yew still growing in the courtyard.

One of the oldest stone castles in Britain, with a hundred-foot Norman keep over the Swale — and a cell block whose graffiti records the conscientious objectors of 1916.

A fourteenth-century fortress-palace above Wensleydale, still owned by the family that built it — and the place Mary, Queen of Scots was held for six months in 1568.

The Neville stronghold where Richard III spent his boyhood — one of the largest Norman keeps in England, standing over a village that still trains racehorses on the moor above.

York's daily open-air market sits in the block behind the city's most photographed medieval street, and it is where the walled city actually shops, eats lunch and buys its flowers.

Yorkshire's self-declared food capital fills its Georgian Market Place with producers on the second Saturday of every month, and the permanent Talbot Yard food court keeps the town worth a detour on the other twenty-nine days.

Four days a week, stalls run the full length of one of the broadest and handsomest market streets in the north, with Skipton Castle closing the view at the top and the Leeds and Liverpool Canal a minute behind.

A market has been held in this cobbled square since a charter of 1310, and on Wednesdays the stalls still fill it, five minutes above the gorge, the viaduct and the best river view in the county.

England's largest monastic ruin sitting inside an eighteenth-century water garden — a UNESCO World Heritage Site where a Cistercian abbey became the ornament of a Georgian landscape.

The first great Cistercian house in the north, its roofless presbytery still rising three storeys out of a hidden valley in the North York Moors.

The largest medieval gothic cathedral in northern Europe, holding more medieval stained glass than the rest of England put together — including the Great East Window, the size of a tennis court.

An eighty-metre limestone amphitheatre, a collapsed cavern ravine and a waterfall in a wood, all strung on one five-mile circuit from a single Dales village.

A Victorian pay-gate footpath from 1885 that threads two river gorges, past Thornton Force and Beezley Falls, in four and a half of the best-engineered miles in the Dales.

James Herriot called the view from this escarpment the finest in England, and thirty minutes on the Cleveland Way from the car park is all it takes to see why.

A working fishing harbour, a swing bridge, a whalebone arch and a mile and a half of firm sand running north to Sandsend, all under the abbey headland.

A smugglers' village poured down a ravine to the sea, with Jurassic rock scars full of ammonites at low tide and the end of the Coast to Coast walk on its slipway.

Five flat miles of sand curving south from a fishing slipway, with a mile-long rock finger at the north end where two national trails come to an end.

The original Bettys, opened on Parliament Street in 1919 by a Swiss confectioner who got off the train in the wrong town, and still the most complete piece of Harrogate theatre you can buy for the price of a pot of tea.

A family bakery on Skinner Street since 1865, still making lemon buns, plum bread and Yorkshire brack, with an upstairs tea room that has fed five generations of Whitby holidaymakers.

Real dairy ice cream made on a Wensleydale farm from the milk of its own Guernsey herd, eaten at a plain counter with the cows in the field behind — the Sunday afternoon stop every family in the Dales already knows.