Roofers in Knaresborough

The roofs of Knaresborough

Knaresborough grew up around a Norman castle from about 1100, but most of what stands in the town centre today owes as much to the castle's destruction as to its construction. Parliamentary forces besieged and took it during the Civil War between 1644 and 1648, and slighted what was left soon after; the direct result, as the record puts it, is that many town centre buildings are built of castle stone. Edward II granted the market its royal charter in 1310, and the market place at the heart of the old town has traded since. The Nidd gorge that makes the town's setting so dramatic shaped its railway too: the first station opened on Hay Park Lane in 1848 and was replaced only three years later, in 1851, by the present station and the high stone viaduct that still carries trains across the river and cliffs below the castle ruins.

That mixed building history shows in the roofs. St John the Baptist's Church, Grade I listed, is built in limestone with gritstone dressings under a roof of stone slate and lead. Around it, Knaresborough's roughly 200 listed buildings, concentrated on Market Place and High Street, carry Westmorland slate, stone slate, pantile and Welsh slate side by side rather than one uniform local material, so knowing which covering is actually on a given roof matters here more than in a town with a single dominant tradition. Much of the walling below those roofs is the reused castle stone itself, a genuine local material with its own weathering pattern that an off-the-shelf repair does not always match.

Knaresborough also carries two claims no other town on this site can make. The petrifying well at Mother Shipton's Cave, down in the gorge below the castle, has operated since 1630 and is recorded as the oldest tourist attraction in England to charge visitors an entry fee, still turning ordinary objects to stone in its mineral-heavy water four centuries on. Up in the town, what is recorded as the oldest chemist's shop in England opened on Market Place in 1720 and has traded ever since. Between the gorge, the viaduct and a town centre built substantially from its own castle, this is one of the more distinctive settings we work in.