A blue plaque now marks Rowardennan, the house on Topcliffe Road in Sowerby where Alf Wight wrote much of what the world reads as James Herriot. His children, Jim Wight and Rosie Page, unveiled it in October 2026, close to what would have been his 110th birthday on 3 October. The World of James Herriot organised it, and the BBC covered the unveiling.
It is a private house, and it sits alongside the town's twenty plaques rather than inside that scheme. We have added it to our blue plaque trail map as a twenty-first stop. The walk from our door on the market square to 23 Kirkgate, where his story in Thirsk starts, takes four minutes.
The house where Herriot wrote
Alf Wight had Rowardennan built in 1953, and it was the family home for more than 25 years. Rosie remembers their earliest years at 23 Kirkgate; Rowardennan was where she and Jim grew up. He kept working as a vet through all of it, so the writing happened in the evenings and at weekends. The BBC report has him in the living room in front of the fire, often with the television on and Joan sitting beside him.
He started late. The museum's biography puts him at about 50 when he began, encouraged by Joan. His early stories were turned down, some of them about football. Then he wrote what he knew, the farms and animals of a country practice. If Only They Could Talk was finished in 1969 and published in Britain in 1970.
In New York, St Martin's Press joined his first two books into one and called it All Creatures Great and Small. His books have since sold millions of copies. The BBC series ran from the late 1970s, and Channel 5 remade it as a hit in recent years.
Alf Wight before the books
He was born in Sunderland in 1916, grew up in Glasgow and qualified as a vet there at 23. In 1940 he knocked on the red door of 23 Kirkgate for an interview with Donald Sinclair, who became Siegfried in the books. That house is now the World of James Herriot, with the surgery and dispensary set out as they were in the 1940s.
He married Joan Danbury at eight in the morning on 5 November 1941, at St Mary's Church at the top of Kirkgate. Joan had worked as a secretary at Rymer's Mill by Cod Beck; the mill was knocked down in the 1960s and a garden stands on the site. He served in the RAF during the war and came back to the practice. Their children, Jim and Rosie, were born at Sunnyside on St James Green, then Nurse Bell's nursing home. Jim became a vet in the same practice and Rosie a GP.
Why the plaque took until 2026
Rosie Page said she was surprised it had taken so long. The Kirkgate plaque went up years ago, and she said his boyhood home in Glasgow has one too, so it was "quite astonishing" that the house where he did most of his writing had waited until now.
Brian and Linda Halliday bought Rowardennan in 2024 and said they had always been huge fans. In 2025 the house became a stop on a new James Herriot walk round Thirsk put together by Roger French. Jim and Rosie helped him create it, and visited their old home when the idea of a plaque was first raised. The plaque sits at the entrance to the drive, placed, Visit Thirsk says, for easy recognition without being too intrusive.
Twenty plaques, plus one
Thirsk's own blue plaque scheme began in 2004 with Thomas Lord, founder of Lord's cricket ground. Roger Knight of the MCC unveiled it on the house where Lord was born, now Thirsk Museum. The scheme has grown to twenty plaques across Thirsk and Sowerby, with fifteen history boards alongside them, and the leaflet from the Tourist Information Centre still covers those twenty.
Herriot was already one of them, at number 23 Kirkgate. The Rowardennan plaque was organised by the World of James Herriot rather than the town scheme, so the count is twenty plus one. Our guide to the original twenty picks out the six stories worth stopping for, from Thomas Lord to Hannah Packer, the nurse from Front Street who sailed for Uruguay in 1882.
Walking out to Rowardennan
The house is on Topcliffe Road, on the Sowerby side of town. Roger French's walking guide has the clearest route. From the Crown and Anchor on Front Street in Sowerby, turn down Gravel Hole Lane, then right onto Topcliffe Road. Rowardennan is between numbers 96 and 98. Its short loop is 3 miles and about an hour; the long one through Rowardennan is 3.85 miles and about 1 hour 20.
The Herriot country is on the way out. The guide follows Cod Beck across Sowerby Flatts, where Alf liked to walk, past Pudding Pie Hill, the old burial mound Jim and Rosie played on as children. Coming back along Sowerby Road you pass the house of Marjorie Warner, the real Mrs Pumphrey, whose Pekingese Bambi became Tricki Woo. Then the Ritz Cinema, where James and Helen did their courting in the books.
For museum tickets and opening times, the World of James Herriot page has what we last checked. If you are driving in, parking and buses are here.
When to leave Sowerby for another day
The guide warns that the riverside path gets muddy when wet. On a wet day, stay on the grass or save the loop for a drier one. There is nothing to go inside at Rowardennan, only a plaque and a nameplate on a family's gatepost, so read it, take your photo from the pavement and move on. If you have a couple of hours and one Herriot stop, make it Kirkgate.
The rest of a day in Thirsk
Thirsk is the real Darrowby, mixed by Alf with bits of Leyburn, Richmond and Middleham. The market has been held on the cobbled square since 1145 and still runs every Monday and Saturday. Thirsk Museum and St Mary's are on Kirkgate, three and six minutes from the square. Our James Herriot day in Thirsk puts the museum and the church into an hour-by-hour plan.
Where we fit
We are at 87 Market Place, four minutes from the museum door, and we won a Flavours of Herriot award in 2022. Breakfast before Kirkgate works well, or come back from Sowerby for lunch. The menu is here, and you can book a table ahead.
