Roofers in Settle

The roofs of Settle

Settle has Anglian origins going back to the seventh century, and a market charter was granted to Henry de Percy in 1250 by Henry III, but the town's built fabric is mostly younger than that history suggests. Cotton spinning became the dominant local industry from the late eighteenth century, with Bridge End Mill converting from corn milling to cotton, and by 1835 the town had five mills employing 333 people, all powered by the River Ribble. The Settle-Carlisle Railway then opened to goods traffic in 1875 and to passengers the following year, putting the town on what is now one of the best-known scenic lines in England and adding a further wave of Victorian building around the station.

What genuinely sets Settle apart is Castlebergh, a 300-foot limestone crag that rises directly behind the Market Place, close enough that the Shambles arcade and the market cross sit almost under it. Stone slate is the historic covering that goes with that geology: Bishopsdale House and The Folly, a Grade I listed building from the 1670s on the main street, are both recorded as stone with a stone slate roof, and Cleatop Farmhouse and King's Mill continue the same tradition into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Plain slate appears on grander buildings such as the 1678 Friends' Meeting House, but the stone slate tradition runs right through the mill and viaduct age here rather than being replaced by it, which is unusual this far into the Victorian period.

Sitting at the southern edge of the Yorkshire Dales within a few miles of the Three Peaks, Settle takes proper Dales weather: high rainfall, a crag that channels wind straight down onto the Market Place, and a valley setting that keeps roofs working harder than they would on flatter ground further east. That combination of an old stone slate tradition, a working Victorian railway town layered on top, and a crag pressing right up against the main street is not something any other town on our patch has quite the same way.