Rooted in 1796. Still growing.

Two hundred and thirty years after the first pines were planted on Harlow Moor, a new identity for Pinewoods has emerged, reconnecting the woodland with its place in Harrogate’s story of health, nature and the Cure.

In 1796, Scots pines were planted across six acres of Harlow Moor. Around them remained a much older landscape of heath, gorse, heather, open sky and bracing air.

It was a modest beginning. Over the following two centuries, further planting would spread across the moor, creating the much larger and more varied Pinewoods landscape we know today.

The earliest planting preceded the great Victorian development of Harrogate as a spa resort. As the town grew, however, the woodland acquired a deeper relationship with the Cure.

Harrogate understood that health was not confined to the water taken at the Pump Room or the treatments administered in its baths. Air, exercise, rest, landscape and time outdoors all formed part of the experience.

In 1898, the Corporation acquired the plantation and surrounding land from the Earl of Harewood. Extensive planting followed, including a further 15,000 pines in 1907. It was believed that when the wind moved through the trees, the scent of pine would be carried towards the town below.

The woods offered shelter from the open moor while preserving its sense of height and escape. People could walk out of the formality of the spa, through the gardens and into an environment that felt quieter, cooler and less controlled.

Over time, the planted forest naturalised. Pine was joined by birch, beech, oak, rowan and other species. Heath, wet ground, meadow and woodland edge remained alongside the trees. Successive generations extended the landscape, walked its paths and contributed to its care.

In 2026, that long relationship has found a new expression.

Pinewoods is being understood as Britain’s Kurwald: a cure forest shaped by air, movement, shelter, scent, quiet and contact with living systems.

The identity has emerged from what was already here: the history of Harlow Moor, Harrogate’s spa culture, the surviving archive, the character of the woodland and the way people continue to experience it.

Ideas once expressed through the language of bracing air and therapeutic walking can now be explored alongside contemporary research into forests, movement, attention, stress and wellbeing. The resinous scent of pine, for example, comes from natural aromatic compounds called terpenes. Shade changes temperature. Woodland softens sound. Moving beneath a canopy changes what we notice and how we feel. It gives us a richer language for understanding why woodlands matter and why people have sought them out for generations.

Pinewoods is both a Cure in its own right and part of a wider landscape. It sits within Harrogate’s Spa Ensemble, connecting the mineral springs, civic spaces, gardens, promenades and open countryside. Together, these places contribute to the broader idea of the Harrogate Cure: a town shaped around the conditions that help people feel restored.

The new identity brings these different strands together. It creates clearer ways to explore the history of Pinewoods, understand its living system, experience the woodland and discover the community work that sustains it.

It also looks forward. Pinewoods has never been a completed landscape. It has grown through planting, natural succession, conservation and the repeated decision to care for it.

Two hundred and thirty years after the first recorded planting, Pinewoods is not being renamed so much as read again.

Rooted in 1796, it is still growing.