The Obelisk

The Ripon Obelisk is an obelisk monument in the centre of Ripon, North Yorkshire, England and the oldest free standing obelisk monument in the United Kingdom. It is located in the market square of Ripon, and serves as a market cross. It is 82 feet (25 m) tall. The obelisk was designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor and constructed in 1702 with the support of John Aislabie, Ripon's Member of Parliament. It has been granted Grade I status and was first listed in 1949. Hawksmoor may have been inspired by recent discoveries that Ripon might have originally been a Roman town. In his 1724 book A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain Daniel Defoe notes "In the middle of it stands a curious column of stone, imitating the obelisks of the ancients, though not so high, but rather like the pillar in the middle of Covent Garden, or that in Lincoln's Inn". In 1781 the monument was restored by William Aislabie, the son of the obelisk's founder and himself a long-standing MP to celebrate his sixty years in Parliament. At this point a weathervane was added in the style of the Ripon hornblower. A plaque was added soon afterwards, which misleadingly implies that William was the builder of the monument.