This website is about Gargrave, a Yorkshire village, set in the dales.

I bought www.gargrave.org.uk URL in about 2000 as a Christmas present for my Dad Dennis French.

The idea was that I’d set up the site and show him how to do it. He usually picked up stuff like that. It ended up with me doing the site and him finding things out. Each year the Village Hall booklet was transcribed in to the site.

The old site hadn’t been updated in a while because the information flow stopped.

The world assumes that it’s an official site managed by the Parish Council, the Village Hall or some other perceived official body. In truth it was always just a couple of blokes doing stuff in their spare time.

People used to get upset when things took a while to get updated, which although understandable wasn’t seeing our side of the thing. I have spent a lot of time working more than one job, that’s just how it was and time was and still is a premium commodity.

Too much work, Dad’s ill health and so many things has meant that I couldn’t keep up and he couldn’t find out a lot of the things he would have liked to. We did what we could, when we could.

The previous site was all hand coded in HTML, it was all that was available at the time and all that I knew how to do.

This incarnation of the site has brought through most of the information from the old site and aims to provide a framework that allows the site to manage itself a bit more. It’s also quite a bit easier to allow others to become contributors.

At some point I’ll provide a description of how to put together a site like this for those who are interested.