A day out in northern England’s happiest town

Whiskery men sit around a wood-burning stove with guitars and a banjo. They start to play and sing the classic folk song by Ewan MacColl, Dirty Old Town. “By the old canal…” go the lyrics, which is appropriate, for here we are, right next to the old canal, the 127-mile long Leeds & Liverpool Canal to be precise, in Skipton, North Yorkshire.

The Boat House Bar, with big windows looking onto a canal junction, is a favourite among gongoozlers, real ale fans and folk musicians alike. Every other Sunday locals gather to strum and croon.

Before long, those men might be singing songs about railways too. The 12-mile Skipton to Colne line, closed in 1970, has been in the news. There are plans to reopen it, to boost transport links with East Lancashire, forming a new trans-Pennine route. Colne MP, Jonathan Hinder believes it will improve access to jobs and housing.

If you are thinking of moving home, Skipton, famed for its building society, is an attractive place to live in more ways than one. This gateway to the Dales ranked as the sixth happiest place to live in the country in a recent poll by Rightmove. I can vouch that the locals are a friendly lot.

With a population of some 15,000, Skipton is small enough that towpath etiquette – to greet passers-by – seems to have seeped into the town’s cobbled lanes and alleyways. “Ow do?” said an elderly man as he tipped his hat. “Beautiful day!” replied a rosy-cheeked woman. In the compact canal quarter of shops and cafes, I ventured into The Beer Engine bar and, over a pint of Saltaire bitter, was soon in conversation with a Skipton resident. Chris loves the easy access to rivers for kayaking and hills for walking, he said. He suggested I could visit the villages of Appletreewick, Malham and Grassington, “where ‘All Creatures Great and Small’ was filmed.”

That unhurried, neighbourly good life of James Herriot’s days still reigns in Skipton. I witnessed the rare sight of students putting empty sandwich cartons and crisp packets into their rucksacks rather than discarding them onto the towpath as they walked from school in Aireville Park. Next to the school, the leisure centre was busy with people over 60, such as myself, enjoying a swim, followed by a sociable steam and sauna, all for the bargain price of £3.55.

On a walk from the canal junction, where a colourful little narrowboat, Sam, belonging to Pennine Cruisers, sets off on 30-minute pleasure trips in all weathers, I followed the towpath of the dead-end Springs branch, beneath the church tower and beside a converted mill, until it became a teetering boundary between a rushing tannin-coloured beck on one side and an ivy draped, disused waterway on the other, the precipitous cliffs and walls of the Norman castle, rising above it.

This branch of the canal was built to transport limestone from quarries in what is now Castle Woods. The broadleaf woods have several way-marked circular walks. “In spring they’re full of wild garlic and bluebells,” said a dog-walker. “What I love about Skipton is that you can walk straight from the High Street into these woods and then out onto the hills,” she added.

Privately owned Skipton Castle, one of the best preserved medieval fortresses in the UK, is notable for being fully roofed. One wing, not open to the public, is the residence for the current owners, the Fattorini family, but for much of the castle’s history it was the Clifford family who called it home. On a visit you can learn about the remarkable achievements of the last member of the clan, Lady Anne Clifford, who restored her family seat after it suffered extensive damage in the Civil War.

Near the castle, a treasure trove of a wine shop sells Skipton gin, its bottle labels featuring a boat on the canal, the castle and sheep (the name Skipton is said to come from “sheep town”). The Wright Wine Company, in a former blacksmith’s, has over 1,000 different whiskies, a similar number of gins, £1,000 armagnacs and countless wines. “We’ve been shopping here for about 40 years,” said one woman, who the owner greeted warmly with a kiss on the cheek. A loyal customer base appears to be the firm’s foundation. “People drive for an hour and a half to get here,” said an assistant.

As for eating out, my pub-acquaintance Chris had mentioned a High Street restaurant, Le Caveau, as the place to go for “fancy food”. With barrel-vaulted ceilings, this cellar restaurant was once the town’s prison – for “felons and sheep rustlers”, it says on the website. At £70 for a five-course menu (or two courses for £35), it was beyond my budget so I made do with home-made soup and a (huge) bowl of chips next to a roaring fire in a friendly inn with rooms, The Woolly Sheep.

When it comes to shopping – a key reason why people visit Skipton these days – the market takes place four days a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday). Stalls stretching up and down the High Street are full of arts and crafts, meat, eggs, cheeses, cakes, hand-made clothes and second-hand books.

That corn mill that I passed, once powered by that tannin-coloured stream, Eller Beck, has been converted into upmarket shops including one selling stylish furniture. Off the High Street, Craven Court is a dinky, covered pedestrian lane with glass roof and wrought iron, developed in the 1980s. Its roots date to a 16th-century theatre but now little boutiques and cafes make for rainy-day browsing.

For a break from shopping, the Craven Museum in the Town Hall is small but perfectly formed. There are sheep-shearing and weaving implements, information about the history of lead mining, the local geology of limestone, millstone grit and sandstone, visible in local architecture, and a map of the historic region of Craven, which stretches from Skipton to Settle and whose name might derive from a Celtic word for wild garlic. There is a display about early tourism and how artists such as JMW Turner and Edwin Henry Landseer popularised the region’s appeal. “The Dales have never disappointed me. I still consider them the finest countryside in Britain,” wrote J.B Priestley.

Inspired, I took the 72 bus for a 30-minute scenic trip to Grassington, disembarking at the last stop: the Visitor Centre for the Yorkshire Dales National Park. I hiked through the village, past a tea shop selling “all cakes great and small” and up into the hills for an exhilarating circular hike that included part of the Dales Way and a high footpath following drystone walls and stone-stepped stiles.

Drifted snow lay in the shadow of walls, sheep grazed near skeletal trees and the views were far-reaching, rolling away for unhindered miles of beiges and greens. Wooden shutters on an abandoned hilltop farm, Bare House, creaked in the wind. Then it was back to the touristy village for a pint of local ale and a tasty lunch in The Black Horse next to a wood-burning stove before boarding a bus for the nine-mile journey to Skipton.

Towns with the epithet “gateway to…” often have nothing more to offer than their location and a train station. Skipton must be one of the finest gateways there is. Before long, there may be another railway line to get there too.

How to do it

Paul Miles stayed in Skipton on a holiday hire boat from Anglo Welsh. More conventional accommodation is offered by The Woolly Sheep Inn. Another option is Heriotts Hotel, next to the canal and opposite the train station. You can travel to Skipton easily by train from London Kings Cross, via Leeds.