By far the largest county in the UK, Yorkshire is extremely popular for its countryside retreats as well as the bright lights of some busy cities like Harrogate, Sheffield and Leeds. Scarborough is the oldest seaside resort in Britain. Read more …
Whitby has been voted the country's best beach and has a beautiful harbour and a Dracula museum to boot (the town is featured in the Bram Stoker vampire story of the same name, as well as some of its many movie adaptations).
Yorkshire has always had a great and not always friendly rivalry with the neighbouring county of Lancashire. Some of the bloodiest battles in English history took place in these shires, as the opposing Plantagenet houses of York and Lancaster fought a bitter civil conflict commonly known as the Wars of the Roses. Nowadays the competition takes place mostly on the cricket pitch.
The two counties are among the most famous teams in this oh so important English summer game. Yorkshire has the nickname “God's own county”, a reference to the beauty of its countryside, with several National Parks formed to protect its moors and dales and rugged coastline. Cliffs of limestone, chalk and jet guard its coast against the sea. Because of its considerable size, Yorkshire is often regarded as three distinct administrative areas called “ridings” (North, West and East Riding), a Scandinavian concept thought to derive from the Viking occupation in the first century AD.