Vale of York

The latitude of the area means that it is influenced by predominantly westerly winds with depressions and their associated fronts, bringing with them unsettled and windy weather, particularly in winter.[3] The drier land in the Vale of York, away from the river valleys, would have been extensively cleared for pastoral farming and small scale cropping before the Roman era.[4] The vale suffered badly from the Harrying of the North when King William I devastated the northern counties of England to punish the population for their resistance to his conquest.[1] The soils, formed from glacial till, sand and gravel are generally fertile and nearly all the land is in arable use growing large areas of wheat, sugar beet and potatoes.The city of York tends to dominate the vale economically and is a centre for tourism, retail, commerce, light engineering and food processing.The East Coast Main Line railway connecting London with Edinburgh traverses the vale from north to south and there are a number of east–west rail links to Leeds, Harrogate and Scarborough.Other villages typically exhibit a linear form with houses of mottled pink brick and pantiled roofs facing each other on either side of a main street.