A SCIENTIFIC SURVEY OF 

 YORK AND DISTRICT 



I. 



YORK IN ITS REGIONAL SETTING 



BY 



A. V. WILLIAMSON, M.A. 



North of the line of the Humber, the essential English Lowland protrudes 

 its tongue between the low-swelling eastern flanks of the Pennines and the 

 bold scarps of the Yorkshire Wolds and the North York Moors until its 

 tip is twisted seawards against the East Durham Plateau. The tip is 

 known as the Vale of Tees ; the rest forms the vale which is named, not 

 from the principal river meandering over it, but from the city seated on 

 the river and centrally located within the area. 



The Vale of York lies in latitudes roughly midway between the north 

 and south of Britain, and the fact that while structurally united to the 

 Lowland South the area is also intimately related, through its surface 

 deposits and river system, to the Upland North enhances, geographically, 

 the significance of its intermediate location. Its historical associations 

 and its economic adjustments, past and present, also serve to emphasise 

 that intrinsic ' betweenness ' which is the basis of the vale's claim to a 

 regional individuality apart from the recognition it enjoys as a great 

 corridor of through routes. 



From the low and indeterminate water-parting between the Tees and 

 the Swale, which marks its entry from the north through the ' Northaller- 

 ton Gate,' the vale extends south for about 50 miles to the line of the lower 

 Aire and the Humber. Thus north and south it merges into areas of 

 similar plan, although historically the marshlands along the Aire-Humber 

 line were, of course, for long a significant hindrance to movement. Modern 

 industrialism, however, has orientated the Tees lowland to the estuary at 

 its mouth, and the development of the Yorkshire coalfield has so trans- 

 formed the landscape spreading southwards from about the Aire as to 

 differentiate it clearly from the essentially rural region to the north. A 

 lowland of drift soils, on which arable cultivation co-exists significantly 



