On 24 November 1859, when On the Origin of Species went on sale in London, Charles Darwin was not at his desk in Kent waiting for reviews. He was at Wells House in Ilkley, in the Yorkshire Dales, undergoing a course of hydropathic treatment with his family lodged nearby. Cold-water cures were the Victorian wellness craze, and Ilkley, with springs the locals had drunk and bathed in for centuries, had become one of the most fashionable spa towns in northern England. The book that changed biology was being argued over down south while its author sat in a cold tub on the edge of Ilkley Moor.
The flint arrowheads found around Ilkley go back to the Mesolithic, some eleven thousand years before any Roman or Anglo-Saxon stood here. The slopes above the town have more than 250 cup-and-ring carvings cut into them, mostly from the Neolithic and early Bronze Age, and the Twelve Apostles stone circle was raised on Ilkley Moor about 4,500 years ago. The Romans put a fort here, probably called Olicana, on the bend of the River Wharfe. Stone altars dating from the reigns of Antoninus Pius and Septimius Severus have been unearthed, including one dedicated to Verbeia, the goddess of the Wharfe; it sits today in the Ilkley Manor House Museum. The name Ilkley is Old English: Yllica's clearing. The Domesday Book of 1086 records it as a smaller settlement than its neighbours, in the hands of William de Percy.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Ilkley acquired a reputation for the efficacy of its cold springs. The nineteenth century turned that reputation into an industry. Between 1843 and 1844 the Ben Rhydding Hydro was built at Wheatley a mile to the east, a vast hydropathic establishment that gave its name to the village that grew up around it. Wells House followed. Tourists came up from London and Manchester to bathe and walk and pretend to be cured of their nervous conditions. A railway connection was opened in August 1865, joining Ilkley to the Leeds and Bradford Railway and the North Eastern Railway; the Midland built a connection toward Skipton via Bolton Abbey in 1888. By the time the spa fashion faded, Ilkley had collected the wide streets, floral parades, and Victorian arcades that still characterise its centre.
Ilkley Moor, the heather-and-grit upland that rises south of the town, is the subject of the Yorkshire folk song On Ilkla Moor Baht 'at, the dialect injunction against walking the moor without a hat. Singers from rugby grounds to school assemblies have warned generations of Yorkshire children of the consequences. The moor's Cow and Calf rocks, a pair of millstone-grit outcrops, draw climbers and walkers; the same steep climb up to them has become a fixture of British cycling. Between 1994 and 1996 it featured in the World Cup Leeds Classic. The 2014 Tour de France passed through Ilkley on its Yorkshire Grand Depart. Since 2018, the climb to the Cow and Calf has been the summit finish of the Tour de Yorkshire's second stage.
Modern Ilkley is comfortable rather than industrial. The high street has Bettys, the famous Yorkshire tea room, and the Michelin-starred Box Tree restaurant where Marco Pierre White trained. Lishman's, the butcher, has won national awards. The town's Lido, built in 1935, is one of only four public open-air swimming pools left in Yorkshire. Ilkley hosts the largest and oldest literary festival in the North of England. The 1984 Alan Bennett comedy A Private Function was filmed here, parts of Calendar Girls too. In December 2020 a stretch of the Wharfe at Ilkley became the first river in England to be designated as a bathing place under the Bathing Water Regulations, following a long campaign by local residents tired of seeing untreated sewage in the water they swam in. The Ilkley Clean River Campaign had a quiet, distinctly Yorkshire victory.
Ilkley sits at 53.925 N, 1.822 W on the south bank of the River Wharfe in Wharfedale, between Bradford and the Yorkshire Dales. Recommended viewing altitude 3,000 to 4,500 ft AGL; the town climbs from the river at about 230 ft up the lower slopes of Ilkley Moor to the south. Visual anchors are the Cow and Calf rocks on the moor's edge and the Wharfe winding through the valley floor. Nearest airport is Leeds Bradford (EGNM) about 6 nm south-east; Manchester (EGCC) about 33 nm south-west. Expect frequent valley fog along the Wharfe in autumn and winter.