The Yorkshire Film Archive collects, preserves, and shows film made in, or about Yorkshire. Our collections are non-fiction, dating from the 1890s to the present day, and providing a rich and visually compelling record of all aspects of lives, cultures, landscape, industries, major events and everyday activities, many of which are available to watch, free of charge, on our website.
This film is part of Free
The West Riding of Yorkshire
A chance to see England’s highest waterfall in fall force, a wonderful long gone watermill, and the Shambles in York, pre-tourism.
From the collection of:
Overview
This tinted film, dating sometime in the 1910s, might well be an example of an early tourist film: taking in York Minster, York city walls, the Shambles, Richmond Castle, Hardraw Force, the old water wheel at Hawes as well as a small girl in a bonnet and dress skipping lightly over the rocks at the waterfalls at Aysgarth. But we can only speculate why the film is titled, The West Riding Of Yorkshire, when all the places featured in the film are in the North Riding of Yorkshire!
This film is part of the Fisher Collection. It isn’t known when the film was made, or who made it. Who were the H. P. Ltd. that appears in the title? It is not typical of the actuality films common for the time that showed local people in street scenes, or coming out of factories, to be shown the same day that they were shot, for a cost. But it may well have been made for a local cinema. Before the advent of colour film, tinting was used in order to produce a mood or atmosphere in keeping with the subject matter of the film, as seen here: yellow for urban scenes, green for countryside and blue for rivers or the sea. The spelling of Hardraur Scaur, is not listed in the authoritative The Place-Names of the North Riding of Yorkshire.
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