"On Ilkla Moor Baht 'At" is a folk song from Yorkshire, England.
It is sung in the Yorkshire dialect and is considered the unofficial anthem of Yorkshire.
It is sung to the Methodist hymn tune "Cranbrook", also known as "Northampton", composed by Thomas Clark, a cobbler and choir trainer at the Wesleyan Chapel, Canterbury. It was published by him in 1805 in A Sett of Psalm & Hymn Tunes with some Select Pieces and an Anthem, setting the words of Philip Doddridge's "Grace! 'Tis a Charming Sound".
According to Andrew Gant, the words to "On Ilkla Moor Baht 'At" were composed by members of Halifax Church Choir "some 50 years after Clark wrote his melody", on an outing to Ilkley Moor near Ilkley, West Yorkshire.
EFDSS director Douglas Kennedy collected a version in 1917 from a performer in Ilkley named Wilfred Hall.
Several audio recordings have been made of traditional versions. Ken Stubbs recorded Albert Gartside of Delph in the West Riding singing the song in 1964 and Fred Hamer recorded William Bleasdale singing version in the village of Chipping in Lancashire sometime in the 1950s or 60s. The American folklorist Helen Hartness Flanders recorded a version in her hometown of Springfield, Vermont and another in Naushon Isle, Massachusetts in the 1940s, suggesting that the song had made its way to North America with immigrants from Yorkshire.
In The Yorkshire Dictionary (Arnold Kellett, 2002) it was said the lyrics probably originated in the Halifax area, based on the dialect which is not common to all areas of Yorkshire.
The first published version of the words appeared in 1916, when it was described as "a dialect song which, for at least two generations past, has been sung in all parts of the West Riding of Yorkshire".
Arnold Kellett judged that the song "could well have originated in the early years of the second half of the [19th] century and not as late as 1877".
It is classified as numbers 2143 and 19808 in the Roud Folk Song Index.
It was printed in Kennedy's Folksongs of Britain & Ireland (1975) and Silber & Silverman's The Hootenanny Songbook (1963).