Giggleswick, a village and civil parish in North Yorkshire, England, lies on the B6480 road, less than 1 mi north-west of the town of Settle and divided from it by the River Ribble. It is the site of Giggleswick School. The village belonged to the West Riding of Yorkshire until 1974.

Etymology

A Dictionary of British Place Names (2011) contains the entry:

Railway station

The village is served by Giggleswick railway station, which provides services to Leeds and to Lancaster and Morecambe. There are five trains a day in each direction, operated by Northern. Close to the station and opposite the Craven Arms Hotel (formerly the Old Station Inn) is the Plague Stone. This has a shallow trough, which in times of plague was filled with vinegar to sterilize the coins that were left by townspeople as payment for food brought from surrounding farms. The stone was moved a short distance from its original site when the Settle bypass was built.

Church of St Alkelda

The parish church is dedicated to St Alkelda, an obscure Anglo-Saxon saint associated with the North Yorkshire town of Middleham. The building dates mostly from the 15th century, but carved stones discovered during the restoration of 1890–1892 showed that a building existed on the site before the Norman Conquest. It has been classed by English Heritage as a Grade I listed building. The restoration, carried out by the Lancaster architects Paley, Austin and Paley, included replacing the roof, removing the gallery, rebuilding the vestry, and reseating, replastering and reflooring the church.

Notable people

Tourist attractions

Giggleswick is notable amongst rock climbers for a limestone crag, retro-bolted with many sports routes during 2005 and 2006. The crag is opposite Settle Golf Club on the B6480, north of Giggleswick. Cave Ha, hollowed out of the massive cliff of Great Scar limestone, is a large rock shelter. Together with Sewell's Cave, it has produced a large amount of archaeological material, including bones which are 5,600 years old.

In the media

An episode of the radio comedy The Shuttleworths was set in Giggleswick. Comedy writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson used the town as their emblem of a travelling actor's date with obscurity in Hancock's Half Hour, The Train Journey episode, broadcast on 23 October 1959. Les Dawson did the same in 1975, in Dawson's Weekly. In 1989, the TV series Capstick's Law, focusing on a family law firm in the 1950s, used Russell Harty's old cottage as a venue. The TV series 24seven was filmed at Giggleswick School.

1927 eclipse

Among few observers of a 24-second solar eclipse in 1927 were members of the Astronomer Royal's expedition to Giggleswick.