What are Conservation Areas?
The statutory definition of a conservation area is ‘an area of special architectural interest, the character or appearance of which it is desirable to preserve or enhance’.
The Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority has a duty to designate areas that, after research and analysis, it considers are of special architectural and historic interest. At this time in the National Park, there are 36 designated conservation areas, some covering features other than domestic settlements such as:
the Settle to Carlisle Railway Line
Craven Lime Works at Langcliffe
Bolton Abbey
the Farfield Mill complex
villages including Castle Bolton, Appletreewick, Buckden, Sedbergh, and Gayle.
The map below shows the location of all 36 conservation areas:
It is the quality of the architecture, visual character and historic interest of these areas that makes them special and worthy of conservation. In making the assessment of an area, many factors are considered in determining its character and quality including:
The historic layout of property boundaries and thoroughfares.
The inter-relationship of buildings and spaces.
The mix of building and land use.
The architectural quality of individual buildings either grand such as Literary Institutes, chapels or churches, castles and country houses, or vernacular such as workers cottages, farmhouses, watermills and barns.
The composition of building groups such as terraces, shops, farm complexes, almshouses or industrial complexes (such as mills).
Vistas into, from, through and around the area under consideration.
The interaction of the natural and the built environment.
The age and social history of the area and its buildings.
The use of materials in buildings, boundaries, paths and open areas.
For more information on Conservation Areas click on the links below.
View the Conservation Area designations
You can view all the Conservation Area Designations using our GIS mapping system. Click here for details and then follow the instructions below.
Once the GIS system has loaded, you need to select Yorkshire Dales National Park from the drop down list. You can then choose to view Conservation Areas on the map by clicking the relevant checkbox and then selecting 'View'. Once the detail has been uploaded onto the map, you can 'zoom' in and out of the maps to see the detail or choose to view them at a different scale. If you click on the Information Tool button at the top of the screen and then click on a particular feature shown on the map, the details of that particular feature will appear in a small dialogue box on the screen
Conservation Area Character Appraisals
Conservation Area Character Appraisals for the following settlements are available for viewing on-line.
Click on the links below to download the Appraisals as PDF documents.
For help downloading files, select from the following file types:
