This website aims to link the past with the present, helping to understand how the people here before us lived in the villages of Acaster Selby, Appleton Roebuck, Bolton Percy and Colton with Steeton.

The site is currently 'work in progress' and at present only the Ainsty, Acaster Selby (updated 02/06/09), Appleton Roebuck, Bolton Percy and Photo Gallery have content. This is a community web site and if anyone wishes to contribute material then please get in touch via the contact page.. 

We have used memories, photographs, newspapers, letters and other memorabilia to illustrate earlier times; much of this material was gathered by the late Syd Winterburn and can now be found at the City of York Reference Library. Syd was an avid collector and his passion for local history, linked with a tremendous gift of recall, is his legacy to our communities. He worked as a bus driver on the Sykes service and knew everyone locally, not just in Appleton Roebuck, where he was born and lived most of his life, but in Bolton Percy, Colton and all the other villages on the service route.

Syd, pictured left in action at a village exhibition was an extremely generous person and his executor, Peter Winterburn, is delighted that we are using the collection in a way Syd would have loved. We are grateful to the City of York Reference Library for scanning the photographs and documents.

The time span is 1875 to the present day – the initial date was chosen because it marked a significant change in parish organisation.  Before St John’s church was built in 1850 Acaster Selby was in the parish of Stillingfleet, on the opposite bank of the Ouse. Appleton Roebuck was in the parish of Bolton Percy, along with Colton and Steeton, and until 1868 had no church of its own.  The centuries-old pattern of parish boundaries changed in 1875 when Acaster Selby joined Appleton Roebuck to become a separate parish, leaving Bolton Percy with Colton and Steeton. St Paul’s church, Colton, was built in 1899 as a chapel of ease (a neighbourhood place of worship to save walking to Bolton Percy) but remained within the parish.