Lying in the fertile Vale of Mowbray between the Hambleton Hills and the uplands of the Dales, Thirsk has long been the focus of trade for a score of villages. The name may have originally denoted ‘settlement by a river’ and certainly the oldest dwellings cluster on either side of the Cod Beck. On the east bank St James Green bears the name of a long-vanished chapel and was the traditional site for horse and cattle dealing.

Across the bridge the road leads into the Market Place proper where the Cross and the Market Hall once stood. On Castle Garth excavations in 1994 uncovered early Saxon graves on the site where the Normans built a castle in the years after the Conquest. The lands around were held by Robert de Mowbray who gave his name to this district. The Mowbrays castle was later destroyed, but by the fifteenth century the citizens were prosperous enough to undertake the rebuilding of their parish church. The church apart, most of the architecture seen today dates from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when the improvements made by the great landowners brought prosperity to the farming community.

Set amid good grazing land, Thirsk was a centre for sheep, cattle and horses, where the Monday market and annual fairs saw lively dealing in beasts and produce. Skins and hides provided raw materials for tanners and leather workers working in shops and sheds crammed into yards behind the houses.

There were corn mills and breweries. There was trade in wool and linen; the wool industry eventually departed to the West Riding, but flax dressing and linen weaving continued into the middle 1800’s.

There was work for other trades as well; there were blacksmiths and farriers, there was an iron foundry in Norby, there were wheelwrights, carpenters and joiners, tailors, haberdashers and the oldest drapers in the kingdom. Shopkeepers supplied the needs of town and country folk alike, while a score of taverns slaked their thirst.

The courts met regularly in Thirsk with the gentry sitting as justices. The well-to-do built prestigious town houses or moved to the more salubrious surroundings of neighbouring Sowerby.

Medical men joined with the clergy, the wealthier farmers and successful merchants to form a social elite.

With the building of turnpike roads in the later eighteenth century Thirsk became a post stage on the route from York to Edinburgh; three of the Inns were noted as coaching establishments. Other houses offered stabling for the horses that were the chief means of local transport until well into the twentieth century.

The coming of the railway in the 1840’s and, later, the growth of motor transport combined with the effects of two world wars, brought radical changes to a way of life that had persisted for some two hundred years.

Crafts have died out and family businesses have closed; the old way of life has largely disappeared, but new industries have developed and fresh skills have emerged to keep Thirsk a thriving community.

Thirsk historical dates • Thirsk museum