Roofers in Skipton

The roofs of Skipton

No other roof on our patch has quite the history of Skipton Castle's. Built from around 1090 in millstone grit and held by the Clifford family from 1310, it was the last Royalist stronghold in the north of England to surrender, after a three-year siege, on 21 December 1645. As part of the surrender terms, the castle was deliberately slighted: the roofs were stripped off so it could never again be held against Parliament. Lady Anne Clifford paid to put them back once the war was over, marking the job with a yew tree in the Conduit Court that still stands, and the roof has been intact ever since. It is one of the most complete medieval castles left in England, and it is complete specifically because someone, quite recently as castles go, had to re-roof it from nothing.

The town below the castle grew as a market for sheep and wool, and its wide High Street, once the sheep market and still a general market today, was voted the best shopping street in Britain by the Academy of Urbanism in 2008. That market-town core sits inside a genuine Dales stone tradition: Skipton has 110 listed buildings, four of them Grade I, and named examples on the record carry stone flag roofs going back to 1675 at Mill Bridge and Victoria Square, buff sandstone under slate at 38 High Street, and stone-coped, springer-detailed roofs on the Skibeden farmhouses just outside the centre. This is stone flag and slate country, not the pantile of the coast or the brick of the Vale of York.

The Leeds and Liverpool Canal, with its Thanet Canal branch, reached Skipton in the 19th century and turned an old market town briefly into a mill town too, while the High Corn Mill on Eller Beck has been grinding since 1310, long before the canal arrived. Skipton earns its "Gateway to the Dales" name honestly: it is the nearest and largest town to a wide stretch of the Yorkshire Dales National Park, and the roofs get correspondingly harder weather the further out towards Gargrave and Embsay you go.