Ripon's story comes alive on this tour around the city. Evidence of life here hundreds of millions of years ago, with 'Ripon' at the edge of a tropical sea, can be observed at Quarry Moor; bronze age henges are to be found to the north and east of the city; Celts and Anglo-Saxons settled between the rivers. The King of Northumbria granted land for the establishment of a monastery in the seventh century and the famous St Wilfrid's monastery acquired international renown.

As a result, the church gained control of thousands of acres of land, with the grant of a judicial franchise or liberty that lasted to the sixteenth-century Reformation. These influences are all to be seen. Like many historic market towns, Ripon owes much of its street pattern, its local government, its economic development and some would say its problems to earlier times. This book will help draw them out for you.