The village is typical of the area, with at its centre a green, one public house, a church, a small primary school, a cricket field and a village shop. Buses run daily from the green to the nearby town of Knaresborough and the City of Ripon.
History
Burton Leonard is mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086 as having 30 ploughlands and belonging to King William.[4] The name of Burton derives from the Old English of Burh-Tūn (a fortified manor) and the name of Leonard, in this case, the dedication of the local church.[5][6]
Burton Leonard has just one pub, the Royal Oak,[14][15] after the Hare and Hounds closed in 2017 and was demolished to make way for new housing.[16]
Station lane in the village leads westwards to the hamlet of Wormald Green, where the nearest railway station was.[17] This closed in 1962, and now the nearest railway station is in Knaresborough, 4 miles (6.4 km) to the south.[18][19] The village has a limited bus service between Ripon and Knaresborough.[20] The A61 road is to the north and the A1(M) motorway, is 5.6 miles (9 km) to the east at Boroughbridge.[8][21]
The underlying geology of the area is magnesian limestone, which many of the older buildings in the village are constructed of.[22] South of the village is Burton Leonard Lime Quarries SSSI, a 9.9-acre (4-hectare) site which supplied lime and building stone up until 1941.[23]
^Ekwall, Eilert (1960). The concise Oxford dictionary of English place-names (4 ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 77–78. ISBN0-19-869103-3.
^Chrystal, Paul (2017). The Place Names of Yorkshire; Cities, Towns, Villages, Rivers and Dales, some Pubs too, in Praise of Yorkshire Ales (1 ed.). Catrine: Stenlake. p. 21. ISBN9781840337532.
^Liber Ecclesiasticus. An authentic statement of the revenues of the Established Church compiled from the report of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the Revenues and Patronage of the established Church in England and Wales. London: Hamilton, Adams & Co. 1835. p. 35. OCLC1064949647.
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