Yorkshire. West Riding - Enid Radcliffe

A vast area, incorporating most of present day South and West Yorkshire, the West Riding embraces the industrial landscapes of Sheffield and Barnsley (steel and coal), Leeds, Bradford and the Pennine valleys (engineering and wool), the beautiful sheep country of the Dales, and rich arable acres in the east, each of them with its own strong and distinctive building tradition. Of individual buildings, Ripon has the only English cathedral with substantial Saxon work surviving; Fountains Abbey, set in eighteenth-century landscaped grounds, is arguably the most beautiful ruin in England; twelfth-century Conisbrough marks the climax of the development of the keep in military architecture and the house at Wentworth Woodhouse manages, extraordinarily, to be both Baroque and Palladian at the same time. Huddersfield has an early railway station in the purest Corinthian, Leeds town hall embodies Victorian civic pride, while Halifax has the unique Piece Hall, a vast eighteenth-century cloth market.