Is Emmerdale the most beautiful TV set in the world?
Hidden away in a corner of Yorkshire is one of the most perfect villages anyone could wish to live in. It has a storybook high street, an historic village church with a vintage village hall next to a well appointed children’s playground. The village boasts a local garage and well stocked ‘delicatessen’. Further up the road near the iconic red telephone box you’ll find a welcoming B&B, a handy vets surgery, a beautician and of course a well frequented local pub serving excellent gourmet food.
The cottages and houses built out of warm Yorkshire stone are laid out with mature gardens, rich in native species and framed by traditional dry stone walls.
On the outskirts of the village you’ll find the local graveyard peacefully nestled in the Dales landscape. Rows of headstones carved with honest Yorkshire names like Sugden, Armstrong and Wilkes, mark the final resting place of the good folk of the village.
Cross the beck over the old arched bridge and you come across the sun blessed cricket pitch, with its wooden pavilion. Alongside it, a couple more cottages with gardens drowning in blooms of roses and honeysuckle. A great spot to while away endless Summer afternoons listening to the twack of leather on willow or the babbling of the brook as it runs through the vale.
For the wilder of heart, up the road there’s a local adventure centre which will get your adrenaline pumping as you go abseiling or white water kayaking. Tourism is huge in these parts so there’s hardly a day goes by without someone booking in for an adventure holiday?
If nature is your thing and you’re lucky you might have a visit from the Red Kites which soar overhead, or the deer which amble down the high street when it’s not so busy.
This is without a doubt one of the most idyllic villages in Britain.
But it might surprise you to find out that for all its many attractions, it has a population of precisely ZERO. Even the graveyard is empty. And despite it feeling like people have been born, lived, loved and died in this village for centuries, it was all built 24 years ago.
Welcome to Emmerdale, an entire 11 acre ‘village’ created in 1998 as the permanent home for the ITV drama after the original Yorkshire village of Esholt became too busy to film in with fans visiting to try and spot their favourite characters and locations.
The Village took a record breaking 20 weeks to create with a team of highly skilled builders working around the clock, 7 days a week to get ready for a move over Christmas, the only time Emmerdale stops filming for a couple of weeks.
This October Emmerdale celebrates its 50th Birthday and these images have been produced as part of the celebrations. They show the ‘most beautiful television set in the world’ nestled in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales. In the distance you can just make out the Leeds city skyline and, in the other direction, the majesty of Harewood House on whose land the Village sits.
And as the programme’s 50th approaches with talk of a storm looming over the Village, the dramatic Yorkshire weather did its best to join in - as you can see on a drone shot captured perfectly above the Woolpack.