On 22 May 1936, the Zeppelin Hindenburg left its normal trans-Atlantic course and crossed over Yorkshire instead. As it passed above Keighley, a parcel fell out of the airship and landed in the High Street. Two boys, Jack Gerrard and Alfred Butler, picked it up. Inside was a bunch of carnations, a small silver and jet crucifix, some German postage stamps, a picture postcard, and a piece of Hindenburg notepaper from a priest in the United States, asking strangers to lay the flowers on his brother's wartime grave. People in Keighley still talk about it. It is the kind of town where a story like that makes sense.
Keighley sits at the confluence of the rivers Worth and Aire in the South Pennines, eight miles north-west of Bradford. Its name, spelled many different ways down the centuries, means Cyhha's farm or clearing in Old English, and the Domesday Book of 1086 records the place as Cichhelai. In October 1305 a Lancashire knight called Henry de Keighley persuaded King Edward I to grant a market charter to the town. The poll tax records of 1379 show that this market town had grown to all of 109 people: 47 couples and 15 single residents. From those small beginnings, Keighley grew steadily through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on turnpike trade and stage coaches running between Yorkshire and the Lake District.
The nineteenth century made Keighley industrial. Wool and cotton spinning mills filled the valley floor, and around them grew factories that built the machinery for other mills: Dean, Smith and Grace, George Hattersley and Son, Prince, Smith and Stell. The town gained a covered market in 1971, an Andrew Carnegie library in 1904, and an enduring relationship with beer. Timothy Taylor's brewery has been operating in Keighley since 1858 and now makes Landlord, several times voted CAMRA's Champion Beer of Britain, along with Boltmaker, Knowle Spring, and Le Champion, a French-style blonde first brewed to mark the 2014 Tour de France passing through the town. The Picture House cinema on North Street opened in 1913 and is among the oldest in the country.
Keighley holds an unusual title: the first recorded town twinning agreement in the world, signed with Poix-du-Nord in northern France in 1920, two years after the Armistice. An even earlier sister-city arrangement, less formally recorded, linked Keighley with the Paris suburbs of Suresnes and Puteaux from 1905. Keighley was also the first place in Britain to have a Spiritualist church, founded in 1853 by David Richmond. Many of those who came to work in the textile mills in the mid-nineteenth century were Irish, escaping the Great Famine, and they built two Roman Catholic churches and four Roman Catholic schools that are still in use. From the 1960s onward, the town's mills drew workers from the Mirpur region of Azad Kashmir in Pakistan and the Sylhet region of Bangladesh, building a Muslim community that by the 2011 census numbered more than 12,400 people.
Keighley's most visible attraction is its steam railway. The Keighley and Worth Valley Railway, preserved by enthusiasts after the Beeching cuts, runs from Keighley station through Ingrow, Damems, Oakworth, Haworth, and on to Oxenhope. It featured in the 1970 film The Railway Children and has appeared in Yanks, the film of Pink Floyd's The Wall, and television series including Last of the Summer Wine and A Touch of Frost. At Ingrow there is a small Museum of Rail Travel. On the edge of town, Cliffe Castle, the gothic-revival country house built up by the textile magnate Henry Isaac Butterfield, is now the town's free local museum. The Brontë sisters lived two miles south in Haworth, but they came down to Keighley for the post office, the train, and the library.
Keighley sits at 53.87 N, 1.91 W in the Aire valley between Bradford and Skipton. Recommended viewing altitude 3,000 to 4,500 ft AGL; the valley floor is at about 300 ft with Keighley Moor rising to the west and Rombalds Moor to the east. Visual landmarks include the dark Victorian terraces along Cavendish Street and the dome of Cliffe Castle on the northern edge of town. The Leeds and Liverpool Canal runs roughly parallel to the River Aire. Nearest airport is Leeds Bradford (EGNM) about 8 nm east. Expect frequent low cloud and orographic rain off the Pennines.