KNARESBOROUGH, a market-town and parliamentary borough in the West Riding of Yorkshire, is finely situated on a rocky elevation on the left bank of the Nidd, 17 miles west by north of York and 207 north of London. It is a station on the North-Eastern Railway, which crosses the valley near the town by a lofty viaduct. The town is built chiefly of stone, and contains several good streets and a spacious market-place. The parish church of St John is an old cruciform structure chiefly Perpendicular in style, restored in 1872; the free grammar school was founded in 1616. Knaresborough Castle, now in ruins, but originally of great strength, was founded in 1170 by Serio de Burgh. After the battle of Marston Moor it was taken by Fairfax, and in 1648 it was ordered to be dismantled. To the south of the castle is St Robert’s chapel, an excavation in the rock constructed into an ecclesiastical edifice in the reign of Richard I. A little further down the niver is St Robert’s cave, which is supposed to have been the residence of the hermit, and in 1744 was the scene of the murder of Daniel Clarke by Eugene Aram. Opposite the castle is a petrifying spring called the “Dropping Well.” Before the rise of Harrogate Knaresborough was a favourite watering-place, but it is now dependent chiefly on its manufacture of towels, sheetings, and similar linen fabrics, and of wool rugs. There are also flour-mills and a considerable trade in corn. From the first year of the reign of Mary until 1867 Knaresborough returned two members to parliament, but since then it has returned only one. The area of the parliamentary borough and local board district, which includes part of Scriven with Tentergate, is 481 acres, and the population, which in 1871 was 5205, was exactly 5000 in 1881.