Village focus: Addingham

The sun sets over the flowering heather above Addingham Moorside. Picture: Bruce Rollinson

IT has long been a location of choice for commuters who like the idea of a life in the Dales without fully committing to the narrow roads and isolated villages that define the National Park itself.

But Addingham is also, somewhat surprisingly, the cradle of one of the nation’s religious denominations.

Nestled six miles south east of Skipton and just three to the west of Ilkley, the village is ideally placed for an efficient journey to the commercial centre of Leeds. It used to be more convenient still, but the railway station that connected it to the city was closed in the 1960s, a victim of the Beeching axe.

But if rail travel is no longer an option for villagers, the road situation improved dramatically in 1990 when the opening of a by-pass, the product of a decade-long campaign, meant that the A65 no longer ran down the main street.

Today, a remarkable sense of community spirit conjoins the 4,000 residents, a tenth of whom are members of the local Civic Society, making it one of the biggest in Yorkshire.

“It’s one of the things that makes Addingham so attractive,” says the society’s chairman, Jim Robinson.

“There are at least 40 different organisations in the village and the challenge is to schedule events that don’t all clash with each other.”

It was the by-pass, he says, that had united the village. The Civic Society was itself a spin-off from of the campaign to have it built.

The community’s pride in its surroundings has manifested itself most recently in the commissioning of no fewer than 13 blue plaques marking significant local landmarks.

The latest, number 10, will be unveiled next Saturday at the tiny Farfield barn that was one of Britain’s first Quaker meeting houses and was named in March alongside Stonehenge and Fountains Abbey, by Heritage England as one of the 10 buildings that most embody the nation’s religious history.

Margaret Cody, who lives nearby and pops in to empty the collection box, described the accolade as “absolutely gobsmacking”, admitting that not even the locals had all known of its existence.

Another plaque marks the railway bridge that used to carry the line north to Bolton Abbey. The site of Addingham station was until earlier this year the location of the Old Station Fisheries, whose owners retired after 28 years.

But if its loss has made fish and chips harder to find, Addingham retains an above-average quota of pubs. The Fleece, a Wharfedale favourite, reopened last year after a fire almost destroyed it, and the Craven Heifer is also back after a refurbishment. There are three others on the main street alone, along with around a dozen cafes, shops and village services.