In 2001 there were 756 residents listed on the day that the census was taken. By 2011 that was 868. The average age was 40 and 41 respectively which is also perhaps unusual in such villages.Houses are a mix of the traditional stone cottages with that yellow stone appearance that you would expect from the Victorian era and prior, there are red brick semis from the turn of the 20th century, bungalows, uniform new housing developments and striking detached individual houses.
Birstwith near Harrogate boasts its own tennis courts and pictured is a player at Birstwith Tennis Club.Birstwith has an annual show which returned in style this year for the first time since the rigours and restrictions of lockdown. This coming Wednesday it will host annual Christmas drinks for villagers at the local pub.
It goes on to say that the very earliest history of human occupation of Birstwith, in fact all of Nidderdale, is rather sketchy but that the earliest local artefacts found around Birstwith are Neolithic axes.Marston’s History of Birstwith says Birstwith is believed to be of Norse origin, Byr-stath, meaning farm stead.Other local names are of similar derivation.
In the early middle ages most land was held by tenancy and the land cleared and farmed by the tenant farmers. The clearance of land slowed with the Great Plague and practically ceased between 1360 and the sixteenth century. By the early sixteenth century most of the land in the Birstwith area had been enclosed.During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries woollen looms started to appear in Birstwith followed by corn and cotton mills and they would become a major source of employment.