A PANNAL resident who has fought to protect some of the oldest buildings in the village for the past 13 years has finally won her battle to save them being demolished – for now.
Anne Smith first started her fight to keep the 17th century Spacey Houses Farm from being knocked down to make way for a new housing development in 1995.
Now, more than a decade later, English Heritage has agreed to include the 14 buildings in its catalogue of Grade II listed buildings.
But Harrogate Council, which bought the buildings at an auction from the Harewood Estates in 1952, had always planned on selling the land for housing, and now it is looking at ways of either converting the buildings, or knocking them down if they can be proved unsafe or structurally weak.
Mrs Smith, who has lived in Pannal for 42 years, said Blind Jack Metcalf of Knaresborough drank at Spacey Houses when it was a coaching inn in the 1700s.
She said: "They are very, very special buildings, but nobody was interested in helping me preserve them."
"I said I thought they were terribly important and that I thought they date back to the 16th century and that is when I rang National Trust and English Heritage."
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