Roofers in Ilkley

The roofs of Ilkley

Ilkley was a moor-edge township with a 14th-century church, All Saints, and a handful of 16th and 17th-century stone houses, the Manor House and Myddleton Lodge among them, before the spa trade transformed it. White Wells, a stone bath house on the moor built around 1791 with elliptical baths hewn from the rock, marks the start of that story. It grew into a full hydropathy boom: the Ben Rhydding Hydro opened a mile east of the town in 1843 to 1844 and treated Charles Darwin in 1859, the year On the Origin of Species was published, and Wells House followed in 1854 to 1856, designed in Italianate style by Cuthbert Brodrick, the same architect who gave Leeds its Town Hall. The Edwardian decades that followed added affluent villas such as Heathcote, designed by Edwin Lutyens with a red pantile roof rather than the local stone slate.

That layered history is why Ilkley carries three separate conservation areas rather than one: Ilkley itself, Middleton and Ben Rhydding. The main Ilkley area was designated in 1977 and extended in 1982. Stone slate is near-universal on the town's older buildings, and Welsh slate and hipped slate roofs cover the Victorian and Edwardian hotels and villas that the spa trade built; Bradford Council's own appraisal for the neighbouring Ben Rhydding Conservation Area names stone or blue slate and red clay tiles as the materials expected there. Three conservation areas inside one small town means a roofer needs to know which rules apply street by street, not just which century a building belongs to.

Behind all of it stands the moor that gave the town something no other on this site can claim: Yorkshire's own anthem. "On Ilkla Moor Baht 'at", sung in dialect and treated as the county's unofficial song, is traditionally said to have come from a chapel choir's ramble and picnic on Ilkley Moor around 1850, though the words were not printed until 1916. The moor's Cow and Calf, a millstone grit outcrop and boulder above the town, is the landmark visitors climb to see, and the ground itself climbs from about 230 feet at the River Wharfe to 650 feet on the moor behind the rooftops.