The settlement of Cold Kirby is recorded in William I’s Domesday survey of 1086, entered under the hundred of Bulford in Yorkshire.

Other Settlements in Bulford

The Meaning of the Name

The name Cold Kirby is of Scandinavian origin. Its final element derives from the Old Norse word bý, a farmstead or village. The first element is most likely a personal name or an early descriptive term, now difficult to recover with certainty. Taken together the name probably meant something close to ‘a farmstead’.

Names of this type are a fingerprint of Scandinavian settlement: they cluster across the old Danelaw, where Norse-speaking settlers renamed or founded villages from the late 9th century onward.

Remarkably, the name has changed little since 1086, when the Domesday scribes wrote it as Cold Kirby.

Listed Buildings Near Cold Kirby

Historic England records 5 listed buildings within about a mile of Cold Kirby. Listing protects structures of special architectural or historic interest, graded I (exceptional), II* (particularly important) and II.

Grade II

Scheduled Monuments Near Cold Kirby

Scheduled monuments are nationally important archaeological sites given legal protection. 3 lie within roughly a mile of Cold Kirby:

Round barrow 600m west of Grange Farm - 1.21 km
Medieval lordly residence immediately west of Church Farm - 1.48 km
Wayside cross base on south side of the churchyard wall at Scawton - 1.56 km

Cold Kirby Today

Today Cold Kirby lies within the administrative area of North Yorkshire, and the settlement recorded a population of 91 at the 2021 census. Nine and a half centuries separate that figure from the small rural community the Domesday survey recorded here in 1086.

Read more about modern Cold Kirby on Wikipedia .