Dog-friendly Rawcliffe

A two-room village pub on Riverside by Rawcliffe green, named after the local eccentric who trained a bullock to ride to hounds and was summoned to meet George III. There is a bar and a pool room, four guest ales and a traditional cider, and it has taken Yorkshire Pub of the Year in 2011, District Pub of the Year in 2024 and Pub of the Season in spring 2025. The Aire bank and the towpath towards Rawcliffe Bridge are two minutes from the door. CAMRA records the pub as dog friendly with no area excluded, which is a branch survey rather than the pub's own words.

Rawcliffe has one of the longest village greens in Yorkshire and the River Aire runs behind it, embanked high above the carr, which gives a straight flat four and a half miles east to Airmyn on the Trans Pennine Trail. The bank top is grass the whole way, above reed and willow on the water side and drained arable on the other, with Drax on the skyline behind you and Goole's dock cranes ahead. There is nothing between the path and the river, which is tidal to Knottingley and runs hard on the ebb. Sheep and occasionally cattle graze the bank in summer, and the Trans Pennine Trail code asks for a lead wherever there is stock.

One of the largest village greens in Yorkshire, a long open rectangle of mown grass ringed by brick cottages, the church and the Jemmy Hirst, with the embanked River Aire immediately behind the north side. It is unfenced on every side and the through lanes are quiet, which makes it the easiest place in the west of the patch for a dog to stretch out for twenty minutes off the bank. Nothing here is a dog exclusion area: the council's only seasonal dog ban is on the four North Sea beaches at Bridlington, Hornsea and Withernsea, and its other restrictions are named children's play areas. The green is used for the Rawcliffe Feast and for cricket in summer, so pick your corner.