Custom
Setting the Watch
Four blasts, and the city sleeps.
Stand where it happened
- What's there
- A tall obelisk in a market square and a hornblower with a horn
- Legend from
- Ripon civic tradition
- Best time
- 9pm nightly
- Tone
- Stately
At nine each night a horn sounds at the obelisk, as it is said to have done since 886.
Every night at 9pm a hornblower sounds a horn at the four corners of the obelisk in Ripon Market Place to 'set the watch', then blows it outside the Mayor's house. Ripon City Council says it commemorates the medieval Wakeman, who guarded the city from 9pm until dawn and had to compensate victims of burglary. Legend says Alfred the Great gave Ripon a charter horn in 886. The office of Wakeman became Mayor in 1604. On Yorkshire Day 2025 all four of the city's hornblowers performed the ceremony together, as the Stray Ferret reported. The council calls the 886 story a legend.