Drax, North Yorkshire
Encyclopedia
Drax is a village and civil parish
Civil parish
In England, a civil parish is a territorial designation and, where they are found, the lowest tier of local government below districts and counties...

 in the Selby
Selby (district)
Selby is a local government district of North Yorkshire, England. The local authority, Selby District Council, is based in the town of Selby and provides services to an area which includes Tadcaster and a host of villages....

 district of North Yorkshire
North Yorkshire
North Yorkshire is a non-metropolitan or shire county located in the Yorkshire and the Humber region of England, and a ceremonial county primarily in that region but partly in North East England. Created in 1974 by the Local Government Act 1972 it covers an area of , making it the largest...

, about 6 miles (10 km) south-east of Selby
Selby
Selby is a town and civil parish in North Yorkshire, England. Situated south of the city of York, along the course of the River Ouse, Selby is the largest and, with a population of 13,012, most populous settlement of the wider Selby local government district.Historically a part of the West Riding...

, best known today as the site of Drax power station. The village has a Community Primary School and a public house
Public house
A public house, informally known as a pub, is a drinking establishment fundamental to the culture of Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. There are approximately 53,500 public houses in the United Kingdom. This number has been declining every year, so that nearly half of the smaller...

, the Huntsmans Arms. It formerly had a village shop and sub-post office
Post office
A post office is a facility forming part of a postal system for the posting, receipt, sorting, handling, transmission or delivery of mail.Post offices offer mail-related services such as post office boxes, postage and packaging supplies...

. The shop was closed and converted into a private home, then converted back into a village shop, and closed down again in January 2007.

History

Drax has a Church of England
Church of England
The Church of England is the officially established Christian church in England and the Mother Church of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The church considers itself within the tradition of Western Christianity and dates its formal establishment principally to the mission to England by St...

 parish
Parish
A parish is a territorial unit historically under the pastoral care and clerical jurisdiction of one parish priest, who might be assisted in his pastoral duties by a curate or curates - also priests but not the parish priest - from a more or less central parish church with its associated organization...

 church, dedicated to St Peter and St Paul. In the reign of King Henry I
Henry I of England
Henry I was the fourth son of William I of England. He succeeded his elder brother William II as King of England in 1100 and defeated his eldest brother, Robert Curthose, to become Duke of Normandy in 1106...

 (1100-1135) William Paganel founded a priory
Priory
A priory is a house of men or women under religious vows that is headed by a prior or prioress. Priories may be houses of mendicant friars or religious sisters , or monasteries of monks or nuns .The Benedictines and their offshoots , the Premonstratensians, and the...

 of Augustinian
Augustinians
The term Augustinians, named after Saint Augustine of Hippo , applies to two separate and unrelated types of Catholic religious orders:...

 Canons
Canons Regular
Canons Regular are members of certain bodies of Canons living in community under the Augustinian Rule , and sharing their property in common...

 at Drax. In 1868 it was reported that traces of the priory could still be found but field work in the 1980s and 1990s has failed to find any physical remains of it.

By the mid-thirteenth century, Drax was a borough of local significance. However, an inquisition held in 1405 stated that the local manor was of no value, as it had been flooded by the Ouse, and the borough was not even mentioned, leading George Sheeran to claim that flooding may have led to the abandonment of the town, or at least the end of its borough status.

In 1667 Charles Read (1604–1669) founded Drax Grammar (now called The Read School
Read School, Drax
The Read School is a boarding and day school operating under the British public school system based in the rural village of Drax, near Selby, North Yorkshire. Formerly a boys' school, it became co-educational in 1996...

) as a grammar school: It is an independent boarding school
Boarding school
A boarding school is a school where some or all pupils study and live during the school year with their fellow students and possibly teachers and/or administrators. The word 'boarding' is used in the sense of "bed and board," i.e., lodging and meals...

. Read was born at Darlton
Darlton
Darlton is a small village and civil parish in Nottinghamshire, England. It is on the A57 road about north-east of Tuxford.The Church of England parish church of St Giles is 12th century and is in the Transitional style. In 1855 it was heavily restored by the architect T.C...

, Notts. and became a wealthy shipper in Kingston upon Hull
Kingston upon Hull
Kingston upon Hull , usually referred to as Hull, is a city and unitary authority area in the ceremonial county of the East Riding of Yorkshire, England. It stands on the River Hull at its junction with the Humber estuary, 25 miles inland from the North Sea. Hull has a resident population of...

. Two years later, Read's will endowed the school at Drax and founded further grammar schools at Tuxford in Notts. and Corby Glen in Lincolnshire
Lincolnshire
Lincolnshire is a county in the east of England. It borders Norfolk to the south east, Cambridgeshire to the south, Rutland to the south west, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire to the west, South Yorkshire to the north west, and the East Riding of Yorkshire to the north. It also borders...

.

Read also funded the building of six almshouse
Almshouse
Almshouses are charitable housing provided to enable people to live in a particular community...

s in Drax for elderly people, stipulating that they should be for three men and three women.

Drax had two railway stations: both are now closed. Drax Hales was on the North Eastern Railway
North Eastern Railway (UK)
The North Eastern Railway , was an English railway company. It was incorporated in 1854, when four existing companies were combined, and was absorbed into the London and North Eastern Railway at the Grouping in 1923...

 Selby to Goole Line
Selby to Goole Line
The Selby to Goole Line was a standard gauge branchline connecting Selby and Goole built in 1910 by the North Eastern Railway The line closed in the 1960s as part of the Beeching cuts.-History:...

: British Rail
British Rail
British Railways , which from 1965 traded as British Rail, was the operator of most of the rail transport in Great Britain between 1948 and 1997. It was formed from the nationalisation of the "Big Four" British railway companies and lasted until the gradual privatisation of British Rail, in stages...

ways closed it in 1964. Drax Abbey was on the Hull and Barnsley Railway
Hull and Barnsley Railway
The Hull Barnsley & West Riding Junction Railway and Dock Company was opened on 20 July 1885. It had a total projected length of 66 miles but never reached Barnsley, stopping a few miles short at Stairfoot. The name was changed to The Hull and Barnsley Railway in 1905...

: the London and North Eastern Railway
London and North Eastern Railway
The London and North Eastern Railway was the second-largest of the "Big Four" railway companies created by the Railways Act 1921 in Britain...

 closed it in 1932. In 1974 British Rail reopened about 5 km of the H&BR from Gowdall
Gowdall
Gowdall is a village and civil parish in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England. It is situated approximately west of the town of Snaith.It lies a mile to the north of the M62 motorway and A645 road and just south of the River Aire....

 Junction and a short length of the NER through Drax as a freight-only branch line
Branch line
A branch line is a secondary railway line which branches off a more important through route, usually a main line. A very short branch line may be called a spur line...

 to supply coal
Coal
Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock usually occurring in rock strata in layers or veins called coal beds or coal seams. The harder forms, such as anthracite coal, can be regarded as metamorphic rock because of later exposure to elevated temperature and pressure...

 to Drax power station.

Drax Power Station

The former Central Electricity Generating Board commissioned Drax power station in two phases in 1974 and 1986. It is the largest power station
Power station
A power station is an industrial facility for the generation of electric energy....

 in the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

, producing around 8% of Britain's electricity
Electricity
Electricity is a general term encompassing a variety of phenomena resulting from the presence and flow of electric charge. These include many easily recognizable phenomena, such as lightning, static electricity, and the flow of electrical current in an electrical wire...

, and is the second-largest coal-fired plant in Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

. It has a potential consumption of 36,000 tonne
Tonne
The tonne, known as the metric ton in the US , often put pleonastically as "metric tonne" to avoid confusion with ton, is a metric system unit of mass equal to 1000 kilograms. The tonne is not an International System of Units unit, but is accepted for use with the SI...

s of coal a day and produces 1.5 million tonnes of ash a year. It is both the United Kingdom's largest producer of carbon emissions, and one of the UK's most carbon dioxide
Carbon dioxide
Carbon dioxide is a naturally occurring chemical compound composed of two oxygen atoms covalently bonded to a single carbon atom...

-efficient power stations.
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