Farnham does not sit alone on its limestone ridge. A handful of stone-built villages and four old market towns lie within an easy bicycle ride — sister parishes, shared lanes, and a thousand-year story we have written together.
Farnham’s Norman church of St Oswald is part of the Walkingham Hill Benefice — a single pastoral charge that links five neighbouring parishes across the lanes north of Knaresborough. The other four are Arkendale (St Bartholomew), Copgrove (St Michael & All Angels), Staveley (All Saints) and Scotton (St Thomas). One vicar; five parishes; a Sunday rota that has been kept — in different shapes — for the better part of a century.
These are also our nearest neighbours by road and footpath. Below you will find proper introductions to each, the working links of their parish councils and village halls, and a short tour of the four market towns that have always supplied our shops, our markets and our trains.
“A village is the company it keeps. Ours has kept good company since the Domesday clerks rode through.”
The white-painted iron fingerpost at the head of the village points the way to three of Farnham’s neighbours — Scotton & Ripley, Knaresborough, and the old bridlepath. Here are those three, set alongside the further parishes that lie round in every direction.
To the west · HG5 9 · sister parish
Two miles west down Stang Lane and Low Moor Lane — the way the Farnham fingerpost still points — the limestone gives way to sandstone and the road drops gently towards the Nidd. Scotton appears in the Domesday Book as Scotone, and the Knaresborough Post of 1881 found its first three landowners to have been the Norman thanes Gilbert Tyson, Ramechil and Robert de Bruce.
The village’s most-told story belongs to one of its teenage residents: Guy Fawkes, who was certainly living at the Percys’ old manor house in 1592 and is thought to have been drawn there into the recusant Catholic circles of the Pulleyns and the Bainbridges — the same world, in microcosm, that produced our own Robert Bickerdike a few miles east.
Lingerfield, the small hamlet in the parish, holds the primary school that Farnham children walk down the lane to attend — Scotton Lingerfield Community Primary School, on Market Flat Lane, founded in 1875. The Anglican parish church of St Thomas’s was consecrated in May 1889, and is one of the five churches in our shared Walkingham Hill Benefice.
“Apart from the Guy Fawkes Arms, the village has little in the way of public amenities — a village hall, a cricket team, a Methodist chapel and the Anglican church.” Scotton, Wikipedia
To the north-east · HG5 9 · sister parishes
Drive north-east from Farnham, cross the line of the old Boroughbridge railway, and the lane opens onto the gentle farmland where Staveley and Copgrove sit, about a mile apart, inside the triangle of Ripon, Knaresborough and Boroughbridge. Staveley is the larger of the two — some two hundred households gathered around the Royal Oak, the primary school, the village hall and the Anglican church of All Saints; Copgrove is the smaller, quieter twin.
Both villages appear in the Domesday Book. Staveley’s centre is now a designated Conservation Area, with a number of Grade II listed properties, and Copgrove’s little church of St Michael & All Angels — recorded as a chapel in 1086 and rebuilt in stone in the twelfth century — carries one detail of particular interest to us: it was thoroughly restored in 1897 by C. Hodgson Fowler of Durham. The same architect, a few years earlier, had designed the new church of St Thomas at Scotton and written the authoritative survey of our own St Oswald’s. One Victorian hand across the benefice.
A short walk north of Staveley is the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust’s Staveley Nature Reserve, the lake-and-reedbed remains of a worked-out gravel pit which is now one of the best birdwatching sites between the Vale of York and the Dales. The 4.5-mile circular footpath that connects the two parishes is among the loveliest evening walks in the area.
“Each village is very much a community — a diverse range of individuals, couples and families, and that gives rise to numerous and varied social and recreational activities within the villages.” Staveley & Copgrove Parish Council
A short directory of the smaller settlements within five miles — the working villages of Knaresborough’s northern fringe, several of which share the Walkingham Hill Benefice with us.
N · 3 miles · benefice church
A pretty linear village to the east, beyond Ferrensby, with the Anglican church of St Bartholomew — the fourth of our five sister parishes. Arkendale’s long-running community website also hosts the directory we used as a model for this page.
E · 1.5 miles
The nearest hamlet to the east of the village — little more than a knot of houses around its old coaching inn, the General Tarleton, which is one of the better-known dining inns of North Yorkshire.
SE · 3 miles
A pair of small joined villages south-east on the way towards the Goldsborough lanes. Coneythorpe is built around a wide green and the welcoming Tiger Inn.
SE · 4 miles
The joined parish to the south-east of Knaresborough, home to the seventeenth-century Goldsborough Hall — once a residence of HRH Princess Mary — and a thriving cricket club.
SE · 5 miles
A tiny scattered parish dominated by Allerton Castle — one of the most important Gothic Revival country houses in the north of England, often used as a wedding venue.
NE · 4 miles
A small village just south-west of Boroughbridge, well known for the Minskip Farm Shop on the old A1 road, and the Wild Swan country pub.
The four towns Farnham has always looked to — for the railway, for the market, for the hospital, for the spa.
2 miles south · market town
Our nearest town and the seat of the medieval honour to which Farnham belonged. A picturesque market town perched high above the gorge of the River Nidd, with a ruined fourteenth-century castle, the oldest chemist’s shop in England (1720), and Mother Shipton’s petrifying well — the oldest paying tourist attraction in the country, in operation since 1630.
Visit Knaresborough →7 miles north · coaching town
The historic crossing of the Great North Road over the River Ure — halfway, in coaching days, between London and Edinburgh. Regency, Georgian and Victorian architecture around St James’s Square, and just outside the town the three Bronze Age monoliths known as the Devil’s Arrows, the largest standing thirty feet high.
Visit Boroughbridge →5 miles south-west · spa town
A Victorian spa town of broad tree-lined boulevards, immaculate gardens (the Stray and the Valley Gardens), and elegant cast-iron architecture. Discovered as a spring in 1571 and grown thereafter into one of the great spa resorts of Europe; today the centre of the wider district, with the conference centre, Bettys, and most of the formal dining and shopping in the area.
Visit Harrogate → Harrogate Guide →4 miles west · estate village & castle
Ripley Castle has been the seat of the Ingilby family for some seven hundred years — twenty-six generations in one Grade I house of medieval gatehouse, Tudor tower and Georgian rooms, set in a Capability Brown park with a lake and walled gardens. After the Royalist defeat at Marston Moor in 1644, ‘Trooper’ Jane Ingilby is said to have held Oliver Cromwell at gunpoint through the night while her brother hid in the priest’s hole. The estate village beyond the gates was remodelled in the style of an Alsace village — its town hall still lettered ‘Hôtel de Ville’ — with the 14th-century church of All Saints and the Boar’s Head inn close by.
Ripley Castle & Gardens → Visit Ripley →10 miles north-west · cathedral city
One of the smallest cities in England and often called “the Cathedral City of the Dales.” A wide market square dominated by the ninety-foot obelisk from which the city Hornblower has sounded the “Setting of the Watch” every evening at nine o’clock, without fail, for over eleven hundred years.
Visit Ripon → Visit Ripon Guide →A handful of practical resources for getting between Farnham and its neighbours on foot, by bicycle, or by bus.
Links open in a new tab. We try to keep this directory current; if a link is broken, do please let the parish meeting know.
Now you have met the neighbours, return to the village itself — the church, the green, the gallery, and the practical pages for visiting.