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Local area guide
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Pontefract is a market town in West Yorkshire, sitting around 13 miles south-east of Leeds, with a population of around 30,000. Its name is Norman Latin for broken bridge, and it was one of the most important towns in medieval Yorkshire — a royal borough with a castle that Oliver Cromwell described as the strongest inland garrison in the kingdom.
Pontefract Castle's history is exceptionally dark. Richard II was imprisoned here after his deposition in 1399 and died in the castle, almost certainly murdered — Shakespeare has the deed done at Pontefract in Richard II, and refers to it in Richard III as bloody Pomfret. Anthony Woodville, Richard Grey and Thomas Vaughan were executed here in 1483 on Richard of Gloucester's orders. The castle withstood three sieges in the Civil War, the last ending only after the King's execution, and Parliament ordered it slighted in 1649 at the townspeople's own petition, fearing a fourth siege.
Pontefract's other claim is liquorice. The plant was grown in the fields around the town from the sixteenth century, and the Pontefract cake — a small flat disc of liquorice stamped with the castle and an owl — has been made here since 1760. Haribo and others still produce liquorice in the town, and Pontefract holds an annual liquorice festival. The liquorice fields also gave Philip Larkin the title of one of his poems.
The town has a Norman parish church and the extraordinary St Clement's Chapel beneath the castle, along with the Hermitage — a subterranean chapel and well cut into the rock by a fourteenth-century hermit, reached by a spiral stair. Pontefract Racecourse has the longest continuous flat racing circuit in Europe at over two miles.
Pontefract sits close to the A1(M) and M62, with three stations — Monkhill, Baghill and Tanshelf — giving services to Leeds, Wakefield and Doncaster. Neighbouring communities include Castleford, Knottingley, Featherstone, Normanton and Ackworth.
Housing ranges from Georgian and earlier property around the Market Place and Micklegate to Victorian terraces built for the pits and the liquorice works, interwar and post-war estates at Chequerfield and Carleton, and modern development on former colliery land, with property among the more affordable in West Yorkshire.






