England | East Yorkshire | Pocklington

Pocklington

Pocklington is a small market town and civil parish situated at the foot of the Yorkshire Wolds in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England, approximately 13 miles (21 km) east of York. It is common in the area to refer to towns in a highly abbreviated form in casual conversation: thus, Pocklington is commonly referred to as "Pock". Pocklington lies at the centre of the ecclesiastical Parish of Pocklington, which also encompasses the small hamlet of Kilnwick Percy as well as a scattering of outlying farms and houses. Justice is covered by the Magistrates district of Wilton Beacon now sitting at Beverley Magistrates Court following the closure of Pocklington Court in George Street. The town''s skyline is dominated by a 15th-century church tower. The town’s architecture is a mixture of quaint old houses and modern buildings and the town has several unusual street names reflecting its history from the Iron Age onwards. It is now considered to be a commuter town for York, Hull and Leeds. Pocklington gets its name via the Old English "Poclintun" from the Anglian settlement of Pocel''s (or Pocela''s) people and the Old English word "tun" meaning farm or settlement, but though the town''s name can only be traced back to around 650 AD, the inhabitation of Pocklington as a site is thought to extend back a further 1,000 years or more to the Bronze Age. It has also been said that Pocklington held the last witch-burning in England.

Overview

Pocklington is situated at the foot of the Yorkshire Wolds, hills which form the eastern edge of the Vale of York, and stretch from Pocklington 40 miles (64 km) or so in a north-easterly direction to the east coast around Bridlington. Geologically speaking, the whole area was originally under water, and, when the land rose, the chalk Wolds were formed from the skeletons and shells covering the sea floor. The landscape around Pocklington therefore varies from flat arable land primarily devoted to agriculture to the south and west, and grassy, limestone hills and valleys to the north and east. A lot of this lower farming country was originally reclaimed from marshland, from the Middle Ages onwards. Crops grown include traditional arable crops seen elsewhere in the country but also include rape seed, turf and sugar beet. The latter is a familiar sight being hauled by tractor in large open-top trailers to York, where it is used by firms such as Nestle and British Sugar. Recent job cuts [5] have put this crop in jeopardy, although feasibility studies have shown that sugar beet could be used commercially to produce cleaner car fuel. Pocklington is bisected by the largely invisible (it now runs underground for much of its length) Pocklington Beck, a small stream that feeds into the Pocklington canal. The beck and canal are usually good fishing grounds but a sewerage overflow in 2003 killed thousands of fish and severely damaged the ecosystem, from which it is still recovering.

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