Roofers in Ripon

The roofs of Ripon

Ripon has sounded a horn at the market obelisk every night at 9pm since 886, a curfew tradition begun by the medieval wakeman and carried on today by the city's hornblower, making it one of the oldest continuously observed civic customs in England. The obelisk itself, 80 feet high, was put up in 1702 by John Aislabie to a design by Nicholas Hawksmoor, and its weathervane is shaped like the same horn the hornblower still sounds below it. Underneath the cathedral, a stone crypt built by Saint Wilfrid in 672 AD survives complete, one of the oldest standing structures anywhere in the old kingdom of Northumbria, predating the current minster, itself the fourth church on the site, by roughly five hundred years.

That depth of history shows directly in the roofs. Ripon has over 280 listed buildings, three of them Grade I, and named examples on the record use genuinely different coverings side by side: pantile at 19 Kirkgate and St Agnes House, slate at 15 and 42 Market Place and at 7, 8 and 9 Kirkgate, and a hipped stone slate roof at the Old Deanery. Thorpe Prebend House carries both at once, recorded with "roofs of pantile and stone slate with coped gables", which sums up the whole city rather well: no single material rules here, and matching the right one to the right building is the actual job.

Ripon sits where the Ure, Laver and Skell rivers meet, on Magnesian limestone at the northern end of the same Permian belt that runs south past Conisbrough and Tickhill on our South Yorkshire pages, with pockets of gypsum underneath that make the ground locally prone to sinkholes. The rivers have brought real, repeated flooding: named floods in 1982, 1991, 1995, 2000, 2005 and 2007 led to over £14 million spent on defences, including an upstream storage area that can hold 53 million cubic feet of water. None of that touches the roofs directly, but on ground this wet, gutters, valleys and outlets that actually clear water are worth as much as the covering above them.