Roofers in Easingwold

The roofs of Easingwold

Easingwold began as two separate settlements either side of what is now the town centre: Uppleby, a Danish settlement, and Lessimers, an Angle settlement whose name meant land on the "lease-mires", leased ground that flooded easily. The combined town appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 as "Eisicewalt", and King John kept a hunting lodge here within the royal Forest of Galtres, which once surrounded the whole area. A market has run since 1221, later formalised by letters patent under Charles I, and still takes place on the same Market Place today.

The coaching era left the clearest mark on the town's fabric. The New Inn and the Rose and Crown served stagecoach traffic through the eighteenth century, a workhouse was built on Oulston Road in 1756 (later Claypenny Hospital until the 1990s), and a grammar school followed in 1781 on the site the primary school now occupies. A private branch railway ran from 1891 to 1957, and in 1908 the Scout movement's founder Robert Baden-Powell visited the town in his role as commander of the Territorial Force; Easingwold's own Scout Group formed two years later, in 1910. The Cabinet Office now runs its Emergency Planning College at Hawkhills on the edge of town, a national civil-contingencies training role that sits oddly alongside a Georgian market town, but is as much a part of Easingwold's identity today as the market itself.

The Easingwold Conservation Area covers Long Street, the Parish Church and Church Hill, Uppleby and the Market Place, and holds 51 individually Grade II listed buildings, including five mileposts and the telephone kiosk on Back Lane. Its oldest surviving building, Tudor House and Cottage, is timber-framed under a swept pantile roof, and that pantile tradition carries straight through the Georgian rebuilding: White House Cottage and Springhead House are both red-brown brick under swept pantile roofs with raised verges, and the New Inn is colourwashed brick under pantile. The grander civic buildings shift to Welsh slate instead, among them the 1837-38 Union Workhouse and Blayds House of 1840, both in pale brick with Welsh slate roofs, while St John and All Saints' parish church combines a Welsh slate roof over its fifteenth-century chancel with lead over the rest of the nave.