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THE whole of Pontefract once smelled of liquorice,’ Heather Copley says. It’s a sweetly scented situation she and her husband, Robert, are keen to see return. In 2012, the Copleys planted liquorice at their farm a few miles outside the town. Three years later, they had Yorkshire’s first commercial harvest of liquorice roots since the start of the 1970s, reviving a tradition that goes back at least six centuries.

How a plant native to Central Asia and the Middle East came to a town in the West Riding of Yorkshire is a source of much debate. It was either brought back from