Kirkbymoorside
Kirkbymoorside () is a market town and civil parish in North Yorkshire, England. It is north of York. It is also midway between Pickering and Helmsley, on the edge of the North York Moors National Park. It had a population of 3,040 in the 2011 census. History Kirkbymoorside is noted as Chirchebi in the Domesday Book of 1086. It has served as a trading hub at least since 1254, when it became a market town. There are two ancient coaching inns extant, the Black Swan with its carved porch, and the cruck-framed George and Dragon, which originated in the 13th century. The Georgian façades point to later periods of commercial prosperity on the coaching route between York and Scarborough. Some Ancient British, Viking and Anglo-Saxon remains have been found in the vicinity. The Norman baron Robert de Stuteville built a wooden moated castle on Vivers Hill. The estate passed to the Wake family in the 13th century, who brought prosperity to the town. However, it was badly hit by the Black Death of the mid-14th century, after which the wooden castle lay in ruins. Prosperity returned after 1408, when the Neville family took over, although little remains of the fortified manor they built to the north of the town. The Nevilles remained Catholic and took part in the Rising of the North of 1569. By 1660 there was a grammar school. (The building is now part of the library.) The great Toll Booth in the middle of the town was built about 1730 with stone taken from the Nevilles' manor. The old Market Hall was gutted by fire but rebuilt in 1872. By 1881 the population of the town was 2,337. There is some disagreement over the spelling of the village: the alternative is Kirbymoorside, which is how the railway companies spelt the name on the station, as how it is traditionally pronounced). Signposts read "Kirkbymoorside". "Kirk" means church and "-by" is the Viking word for settlement, so that the name translates as "settlement with a church by the moorside", or as Ekwall argues, Moorside is "Moresheved" which means "top of the moor". A valley near the town is known as Kirkdale. George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, died on 16 April 1687, in the house of a local tenant, from a chill caught whilst hunting nearby. England’s oldest fox hunt, still running today, is the Bilsdale Hunt in Yorkshire, which the Duke founded in 1668. The building, Buckingham House, is located in the town centre. Manor Vale, a stretch of woodland managed by the town council, was part of a deer park and contains the Grade II remains of the manor. It contains areas of both acidic and alkaline soil. It is home to a rare beetle species, Oedemera virescens. In the 1600s and at least until the 1700s, a number of Quakers resided in this area and in nearby Hutton-le-Hole. The Quaker Meeting Hall built in 1690 still stands, although it was significantly modified in 1790 and extended