Ask people who know the dales best about where they would choose to stay, walk and sit with a pint, this name comes up again and again.
Askrigg sits in upper Wensleydale, about five miles east of Hawes, a long stone village running along a single main street with views straight across the dale.
It has a cobbled market square, an imposing church, handsome 18th and 19th-century houses and lanes that peel away towards meadows and moor.
On a still evening, with swallows looping over the roofs and the last light on the fields, it looks exactly like the village people imagine when they think “Yorkshire Dales”.
Locals have always known this.
Television producers worked it out in the late 1970s. When the BBC needed a real-life stand‑in for “Darrowby”, the fictional town in James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small, they didn’t pick Hawes — they picked Askrigg.
Skeldale House, the vet’s surgery in the series, is really a house on Main Street, and the King’s Arms became the Drovers Arms on screen. Fans of the show still come to stand outside the doorway and walk the same cobbles.
The village has history layered into almost every stone. It is mentioned in the Domesday Book and its name comes from Old Norse, meaning “ridge of ashes”.
It grew in importance after the plague devastated nearby Wensley in the 1500s and Askrigg took on the weekly market, becoming a small but prosperous centre for textiles, brewing and clock‑making. In 1908 it became the first place in Wensleydale to have electric light, thanks to a local entrepreneur who used machinery at a nearby mill to generate power for the village long before the National Grid arrived.
What really makes Askrigg different, though, is what lies just beyond the houses. To the west, a short footpath from the church leads into a stretch of bluebell woodland and up towards a series of waterfalls on Mill Gill and Whitfield Gill.
Mill Gill Force drops around 70 feet over rock ledges in a narrow, wooded gorge; further upstream, Whitfield Gill Force falls 50 feet in a single white curtain. Between them are smaller cascades and stretches of quiet beck where you can sit on the rocks and hear nothing but water and birds.
Walkers talk about this route in three parts: the climb through the woods alongside the beck, the time spent just standing and watching the falls, and then the long, gentle return along old lanes and trackways with wide views back across Wensleydale.
On a good day you can see hay meadows near the village church dotted with wildflowers in late spring, drystone walls stepping up the hillsides and the high limestone edge of Ellerkin Scar in the distance.
Back in the village, life is still centred on the main street. There are traditional pubs, a tearoom, a village shop and a small cluster of B&Bs and cottages that fill quickly in walking season.
St Oswald’s Church, with its tall perpendicular tower, anchors one end of the street and the old market cross stands near the middle, a reminder of when this was the commercial heart of the dale. It feels lived‑in rather than staged: washing on lines in back gardens, children on bikes, farmers bringing trailers through the square.
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Hawes will always get the coaches.
It has the cheese, the museum and the bustle.
But if you are looking for somewhere that feels both quietly local and almost impossibly picturesque — with waterfalls five minutes from the pub and the ghost of a beloved TV series in the stones — Askrigg is the village Wensleydale people mention with a knowing smile.
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