Just for Christmas: the Harrogate pub that becomes the Sleigh & Reindeers

25.12.2023 - 02:40 / theguardian.com / queen Victoria

Few towns wear their Christmas ornaments with the charm and panache of Harrogate. Perhaps it’s the mass of wonderful gritstone buildings and all the Victorian shop windows that seem from a bygone age. My end point will be the Coach & Horses on West Park – which has changed its name to the Sleigh & Reindeers for the festive season.

I start at the railway station and head north, passing one of the country’s great cafes, Bettys. Peering inside I can see a dazzle of polished woodwork and brass, plus platoons of prim staff dressed as if to serve Charles Dickens with cakes that carry names like ginger tart and fat rascal. It always pains me to pass such treats, but it’s too early in the walk to stop.

Heading down the hill, I reach the reason for all this 19th-century grandeur: the spa pump room. It’s now a fascinating museum, but around the back is a brass tap where you can get a taste of why the town became famous: the stinking sulphur waters, seen by every Victorian medical man as a sovereign remedy for almost everything, except gullibility. A sign warns you not to try the water, but I do. It’s horrible.

Follow your nose through the imposing gates into Valley Gardens and walk upstream past some fine beds of Gunnera manicata, “giant rhubarb”, covered up in winter to protect the rhizomes as it’s a Brazilian native species. Every now and again there’s the whiff of sulphur rising from the beck, adding a wildly volcanic edge to the manicured surroundings. There are plenty of other botanical prize specimens in here: look out for the dawn redwood, the Wollemi pine and a black mulberry. Some trees date back to the opening of the park in 1887, Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee. The park also contains many of Harrogate’s 35 springs and wells, each with a distinctive concoction of dissolved chemicals, and in their heyday, a coterie of supporting quacks.

In 1571, William Slingsby started things rolling, identifying a curative water as similar to one he had sampled on his European grand tour. By the 1840s the town had become a thriving resort for the rich, famous and afflicted, all convinced that rigorous programmes of enforced spa water and rest were the answer to their woes. The Royal Pump Room Museum’s original exhibits give the flavour: “The walk home can be advantageous if it can be accomplished without undue fatigue.” Those yesteryear physicians would have a fit of the vapours if they saw today’s joggers and power walkers overexerting themselves along the paths where once the crown princes and princesses of Europe managed an occasional listless amble.

I stride uphill into the Pinewoods, a 31-hectare (76-acre) plantation where all the small birds suddenly fall silent and a sparrowhawk zips over my head. A mile