The county of Yorkshire is, and always has been, the largest county in England. It has a boundary some 600 miles long. For administrative purposes, in days gone by, it was split into three parts - the North, West, and East Ridings. The term Riding is derived from the Danish word ‘thridding’, meaning a third. There was therefore never a ‘South Riding’, except in literary terms since there was a book published by that name by Winifred Holtby in 1950.
The County Council headquarters of the three Ridings were at Northallerton, Wakefield and Beverley in the order given above. However, there was also a somewhat flippant title given at one time to the areas around Sheffield and Doncaster, that being ‘The Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire’ - but it was only a fictitious name - not anything in real terms. These three large administrative areas joined at York which, since it was a County Borough in its own right remained an independent Council and, at the time of writing, is currently a unitary authority.
This occasional three-part article seeks to give a flavour of the various types of steam rollers over time which saw use in and around the three Ridings - starting with the West Riding. This, the largest of the three, stretched from beyond Skipton as far as
