OTLEY’S Bellman has marked Yorkshire Day in traditional style.

This year’s local celebrations may have been pared back due to the coronavirus but Terry Ford ensured that residents and visitors to the town still knew all about it on Saturday, August 1.

Mr Ford, a champion town crier and multiple award winner, read out the Declaration of Integrity (Yorkshire Day proclamation) at the Maypole, in Manchester Square, at noon.

Yorkshire Day’s origins stretch back to 1975 when it was first held in Beverley as a protest against local government re-organisation.

The date is the anniversary, too, of the emancipation of slaves in the British Empire on August 1, 1834.

It was a Yorkshire MP, William Wilberforce, who led the abolitionist movement.

This photograph of Mr Ford reading the Declaration was taken by former Otley Town Councillor Douglas Robinson.