Not a list of odd place names. Seven real sites, each with a documented, checkable reason why it is genuinely strange, not just old or scenic.
Search for strange places in Yorkshire, and most lists hand you the same padding: a joke about a village called Booze, a photo of a pig skeleton in a museum, a paragraph on place names nobody can pronounce. Fun for thirty seconds, forgotten immediately after.
These seven strange places in Yorkshire earn the word properly. A ruined farmhouse with a folklore story that turned out to have a real answer. A pyramid built for tracking missiles. A cave big enough to swallow a cathedral. Each one has a specific, sourced reason it belongs on this list, not just a good photo.
Region: Yorkshire Dales, North York Moors and West Yorkshire
Best for: curious day trips, photography, history that does not show up in the school textbooks
Getting there: a mix of car and footpath, several require a proper walk-in, detailed under each entry
Time needed: one to three hours per site, longer for Gaping Gill if you plan around its limited opening dates
What Makes These the Genuinely Strange Places Yorkshire Has to Offer
Strange is not the same as scenic, nor is it the same as old. Every place below earns the word for a specific, checkable reason: a folklore story that turned out to have a documented answer, an active military installation disguised as a landmark, a piece of geology or prehistory that still puzzles specialists. Where a claim leaned on nothing stronger than a travel blog, it has been softened rather than repeated as settled fact.
Crackpot Hall, Swaledale
Crackpot Hall sits abandoned above the River Swale near Keld, its name most likely from the Norse for a hole where crows nest. A building has stood on the site since the 16th century, first as a hunting lodge, later as offices for the lead mines that once worked this stretch of Swaledale. Subsidence from that same mining forced its final abandonment in 1953.
The stranger part is the story attached to it. For decades, guidebooks repeated a tale from the 1930s about a wild, barefoot four-year-old named Alice, apparently living feral around the ruin. A BBC Radio 3 documentary later tracked down the real Alice Harker, by then in her eighties, living an ordinary life in Carlisle. She had simply grown up at Crackpot Hall with five brothers and sisters, and the hills had been her family’s ordinary playground, not a wilderness she had gone native in.
Wind funnels straight through the empty window frames here even on a calm day, the sound carrying further than it should across the open fellside.
Where to Stay: The Kings Arms Hotel, Reeth, a family-run hotel in the Swaledale village closest to Crackpot Hall.
Worth Knowing: The ruin sits beside the riverside path covered in our guide to river walks across the Yorkshire Dales, an easy way to see it without a special trip.
RAF Fylingdales, North York Moors
Three vast geodesic radar domes stood on this stretch of moorland from 1963, nicknamed the golf balls, visible for miles and popular enough that coach drivers would switch on the radio nearby just to let passengers hear the interference the radars caused. Between 1989 and 1992, a US defence contractor replaced them with the current structure: a 33-metre tetrahedron, immediately nicknamed the pyramid, housing phased-array radar that tracks ballistic missiles and orbital debris, including the International Space Station.
This is an active Ministry of Defence site, not a visitor attraction. There is no public entry, and the strangeness here is entirely in seeing a genuine early-warning missile radar rising out of open heather moorland, visible from public roads and moorland footpaths around Fylingdales Moor.
The pyramid catches low winter light in a way no natural feature on this moor does, a flat grey-white surface that looks almost artificial against the heather even from a distance.
Where to Stay: The White Swan, Pickering, a family-run coaching inn within driving distance of the moorland roads around Fylingdales.
Worth Knowing: Do not attempt to approach the site itself; view it only from public roads or rights-of-way. It remains a live operational MOD installation.
Gaping Gill, near Clapham
On the southern flank of Ingleborough, Gaping Gill drops around 100 metres into the largest underground chamber in Britain naturally open to the surface, a space the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority and cavers alike describe as large enough to fit York Minster inside. Fell Beck pours into the hole as England’s tallest unbroken waterfall, dropping the full depth of the shaft in one fall.
For most of the year, this is a serious caving-only site. For one week each in May and August, the Bradford Pothole Club and Craven Pothole Club set up a winch and opened the chamber to anyone willing to queue, lowering visitors down into daylight falling through the roof far above. Check both clubs’ current-year dates before planning a trip; they are not fixed to the same calendar weeks every year.
Standing at the chamber floor during a winch meet, daylight falls through the opening in a single shaft of light against total darkness everywhere else, a sight nothing at ground level prepares you for.
Where to Stay: Falcon Manor, Settle, a Grade II listed hotel within driving distance of Clapham and the Gaping Gill approach path.
Worth Knowing: The walk in from Clapham takes roughly ninety minutes each way; wear proper boots regardless of whether you plan to descend.
Swastika Stone, Ilkley Moor
A Scheduled Monument on Woodhouse Crag above Ilkley, the Swastika Stone bears a curvilinear carving of four curved arms with cup marks, dated broadly to the Late Neolithic or Bronze Age, somewhere between 2800 and 500 BC. Nobody has settled what the carving meant to the people who made it, and the accepted academic position is that its purpose remains genuinely unknown rather than romantically mysterious.
What most visitors do not realise is that the carving they photograph through the railings is a Victorian copy, cut to protect the much older original, which sits just beyond it on the same outcrop.
Cross-light in the late afternoon picks out the carved grooves far more clearly than full daylight does, so it’s worth timing a visit around if photographing the design is the goal.
Where to Stay: The Craiglands Hotel, Ilkley, a Victorian hotel a short drive from the Ilkley Moor footpath up to the stone.
Worth Knowing: The footpath from Ilkley towards White Wells and beyond leads directly to the stone, roughly a quarter-mile walk once you reach the moor.
Devil’s Arrows, Boroughbridge
Three Neolithic standing stones rise from a field beside the A168 outside Boroughbridge, erected around 2700 BC and originally part of an alignment that may have included up to five stones. The tallest of the three survivors stands 6.85 metres, the second-tallest standing stone anywhere in Britain, beaten only by the Rudston Monolith elsewhere in Yorkshire.
Deep grooves run top to bottom on each stone, the result of millennia of rain eroding the millstone grit, quarried most likely from Plumpton Rocks near Knaresborough and hauled roughly nine miles to where they stand. Nobody has fully explained why this exact spot, or what ceremonies the alignment once served.
The stones sit close enough to the road that traffic noise never fully disappears, an odd contrast standing beside something built four and a half thousand years before the road existed.
Where to Stay: The Crown Hotel, Boroughbridge, a restored Georgian coaching inn in the town centre, a short walk from the stones.
Worth Knowing: The stones stand on private farmland but are viewable and accessible from a public footpath running alongside the field.
Norber Erratics, near Austwick
On the slopes above Crummackdale, around a hundred pale sandstone boulders sit balanced on plinths of darker limestone, carried here by glacial ice roughly 12,000 years ago as the last ice age ended and left stranded when the ice melted. Centuries of rain have worn the softer limestone away faster than the harder sandstone above it, leaving each boulder perched on its own eroded pedestal.
The Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority has flagged the erratics as a site to watch as climate patterns shift, with higher soil moisture and more frequent flash flooding raising the risk of landslip damage to the boulders and the ground beneath them over time.
Approach from the west in late afternoon, and the low sun throws each boulder’s shadow far longer than its actual size, exaggerating the whole slope into something closer to a sculpture park than a hillside.
Where to Stay: Falcon Manor, Settle, the same hotel that covers Gaping Gill, a short drive from Austwick and the erratics.
Worth Knowing: stick to the marked path across the access land; the boulders and the ground supporting them are more fragile than they look.
Cottingley Fairies Location, Bradford
In July 1917, sixteen-year-old Elsie Wright borrowed her father’s camera and photographed her nine-year-old cousin Frances Griffiths beside Cottingley Beck, apparently surrounded by dancing fairies. The photographs eventually reached Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, who championed them as genuine, and the story became one of the most famous photographic hoaxes of the twentieth century.
Elsie did not admit the truth publicly until a letter of confession in 1983, explaining decades later in an interview that she and Frances had simply been too embarrassed to correct “a brilliant man like Conan Doyle” once he had taken their side. The beck itself, a small wooded valley the girls played in and regularly got in trouble for coming home wet from, still runs through Cottingley today.
Even now, the beck’s narrow wooded stretch has an obvious appeal for exactly the kind of imaginative afternoon that produced the original photographs.
Where to Stay: Premier Inn Bradford North, Bingley, close to Cottingley and the wider Bingley and Saltaire area.
Worth Knowing: The University of Leeds holds archive material connected to the case, useful background reading for anyone wanting the full, sourced version of the story rather than the shorthand.
Practical Tips
- Check RAF Fylingdales’ status before visiting. This is an active military site with no public entry; view only from public roads or rights of way.
- Confirm Gaping Gill’s current-year winch weekend dates directly with the Bradford Pothole Club or Craven Pothole Club before planning a trip; they change annually.
- Wear proper walking boots for Crackpot Hall, Norber Erratics and the Swastika Stone; all three involve uneven ground away from paved paths.
- Photograph the Swastika Stone in low, angled light for the clearest view of the carved grooves.
- Use the AllTrails app to plan the walk into Gaping Gill or the approach to Norber Erratics before setting out.
- Respect that the Devil’s Arrows stand on private farmland; stay on the public footpath rather than entering the field itself.
Responsible Visiting
Treat every site here as a place where people live and work, not a theme park. RAF Fylingdales, in particular, is a functioning military installation; respect it as such and never attempt to approach beyond a public road or footpath. Leave the Devil’s Arrows, the Swastika Stone and the Norber Erratics exactly as found; none of them can be replaced if damaged. Take rubbish home from Crackpot Hall and Gaping Gill; neither has bins on site.
Reader Q&A
What is the strangest place in Yorkshire?
There is no single answer, but RAF Fylingdales’ pyramid radar and Gaping Gill’s cathedral-sized underground chamber are the two most physically startling entries on this list.
Can you go inside RAF Fylingdales?
No. It is an active Ministry of Defence site with no public access, visible only from public roads and moorland footpaths around Fylingdales Moor.
When can you visit Gaping Gill?
Only during winch weekends run by the Bradford Pothole Club and Craven Pothole Club, typically one week each in May and August, check both clubs’ current-year dates before travelling.
Is the Swastika Stone the original carving?
The stone closest to the viewing railing is a Victorian copy that protects the original, which sits just beyond it on the same rock outcrop.
Was the Cottingley Fairies photograph ever proven to be fake?
Yes. Elsie Wright confessed in a 1983 letter that she and her cousin Frances had staged the 1917 photographs and were too embarrassed to correct Arthur Conan Doyle once he had championed them as real.
Is the Crackpot Hall “wild child” story true?
Not as usually told. A BBC Radio 3 documentary traced the real Alice Harker decades later and found an ordinary childhood, not the feral wild child of local legend.
Where to Stay
The Kings Arms Hotel, Reeth. A family-run hotel closest to Crackpot Hall in Swaledale.
The White Swan, Pickering. A coaching inn within reach of RAF Fylingdales and the surrounding moor roads.
Falcon Manor, Settle. A ten-minute walk from Settle station, covering both Gaping Gill and Norber Erratics.
The Craiglands Hotel, Ilkley. A short drive from the Swastika Stone footpath.
The Crown Hotel, Boroughbridge. A restored coaching inn a short walk from the Devil’s Arrows.
Premier Inn Bradford North, Bingley. Close to Cottingley and the Cottingley Beck area.
Seven places, seven different kinds of strange, and every one of them stranger for being true rather than exaggerated. For more of what Yorkshire hides in plain sight, our guide to hidden family days out across the county covers several more places most visitors drive straight past.
