Yorkshire from the Air - Aerofilms

Yorkshire is a region of startling contrasts and often of immense beauty. Historically Britain’s largest county, the area includes the sprawling industrial towns of the south and the tiny hill villages of North Yorkshire, the rugged heather-clad moorland of the Pennines and the North Yorkshire Moors and the gently rolling chalk hills of the Wolds, the limestone patchwork of the hills and valleys of the Dales and the magnificent steep cliffs and generous bays of the east coast. There are castles and coalmines, bustling market and mill towns, Roman forts and stately homes. Incomparably beautifül Cistercian abbeys bear witness to a rich and prosperous agricultural past while a wealth of Victorian civic architecture is a monument to more recent industrial success.

From the air, this varied landscape acquires a unique perspective. Unexpected patterns and symmetries reveal themselves; distances are reduced. A hillside in Wensleydale becomes a maze of criss-crossing dry stone walls, while the course of a river that once flowed over the 300 foot lip of Malham Cove or the foundations of a ruined abbey like Jervaulx are now clearly visible. We can marvel at the natural phenomena that have created Filey’s impressive Brigg, a pitted finger of rock stretching nearly a mile into the North Sea, or at the feat of engineering by which George Stephenson hauled the North Yorkshire Moors Railway up remote Newton Dale. Towns, too, show intriguing details from the air. In Wakefield a thirteenth-century chapel is revealed clinging to a modern bridge amidst a complex tangle of new roads; row upon row of neat Victorian red-brick terraces give the Leeds* Harehills area an almost ‘toytown’ appearance; a storm over Halifax recalls the days of the Industrial Revolution when its smoking chimneys earned the town the nickname ‘the Devil’s Cauldron’; and traces of York’s long and eventful history can be seen in the remains of Roman walls, the medieval Clifford’s Tower and, of course, the Minster.