48 HOURS IN… Harrogate and Knaresborough
Harrogate has been attracting visitors for centuries. In the decades before the First World War, the elegant spa town had become a fashionable resort for the wealthy middle-classes escaping city smog. But Charles Dickens wasn’t a fan. After visiting he wrote that, ‘Harrogate is the queerest place with the strangest people in it, leading the oddest lives of dancing, newspaper reading and dining.’ When they weren’t drinking the curative waters, or submitting to treatments such as hot peat baths or hydrotherapy, visitors could take a charabanc ride to nearby Fountains Abbey or the unusual geological formations at Brimham Rocks. Visitors also
