10 Weirdest and Most Isolated Towns in Yorkshire

In one Yorkshire village, archaeologists found 137 bones with knife marks, burn patterns, and missing skulls — the first scientific evidence in England of people mutilating their own dead to stop them rising from the grave. In another, families lived for over a century next to a chemical plant fuelled by fermented human urine shipped from London. And on the Holderness Coast, an entire town is dissolving into the sea at four metres a year, while you watch this video. Yorkshire has been quietly undoing itself for 2,000 years. In this video, we explore: → A deserted medieval village in a chalk valley where the last residents broke the bones of their dead, removed the skulls, and burned the corpses to stop revenants walking out of the graveyard → A coastal hamlet that processed shale, kelp, and barrels of human urine into industrial chemicals for 144 years — until the cliff it stood on sheared off in 1829 and dropped most of the village into the sea → A Dales hamlet so remote it slipped through every crack in British history: too marginal for the Romans, too small for the Domesday scribes, too remote for the Industrial Revolution → A village 1,380 feet up on the moors where Roman lead ingots stamped 81 AD have been pulled from the earth — meaning miners were working this hilltop before Hadrian built his wall → Breary Banks Camp in Colsterdale, where 700 men trained as the Leeds Pals before marching to the Somme on July 1st 1916, where the entire battalion was virtually annihilated in a single morning → An entire valley turned over to lead mining, with hamlets called Whaw, Eskeleth, and yes, Booze — a ghost valley where the line between inhabited and abandoned has dissolved entirely → A village of 1,250 people deliberately drowned in 1936 to give Leeds a reservoir — that resurfaced in the 2022 heatwave when the water dropped, foundations and roads visible for the first time in nearly a century → A clifftop town that was never built: Victorian developers laid sewers, surveyed roads, and named streets for a resort of thousands, then went bust. The infrastructure is still there. The houses never came. And at number one: a Norman castle built in 1086 that has stood on the East Yorkshire coast for 900 years, now perched on the edge of cliffs disappearing at four metres a year. Twenty-nine villages have already gone into the North Sea since Roman times. This one is number thirty, and it's dying right now. Subscribe for more hidden corners of Britain. #HiddenBritain #Yorkshire #GhostTowns #AbandonedPlaces #ForgottenPlaces #BritishHistory #YorkshireDales #NorthYorkMoors #HoldernessCoast #LostVillages