IT began life as a Victorian village school, before being converted into a reading room in 1904 and ultimately a library.

Now Grade II listed Dringhouses Library has become the latest building in York to be honoured with a Civic Trust plaque.

Built as the village school in about 1850 - with a classroom building, the schoolmaster's house and another cottage next door - it became the village reading and recreation room in 1904, when the school moved elsewhere.

When Colonel George Wilkinson, the last Lord of the Manor of Dringhouses, died in 1941, he left it to be used 'for the benefit of the Citizens of York and particularly the inhabitants of Dringhouses'. It is still run as a library today.

Deciding that it merited a plaque wasn't a difficult decision, says Civic Trust chief executive David Fraser.

"York has a history of ensuring that information and education are available to everyone in the city," he said. "Dringhouses library is a fine representation of this."

There are about a hundred plaques attached to walls and buildings across York, celebrating people, places and events that have made an important mark on the city - and even the country.

There are two to George Hudson; one to the poet WH Auden; others to St Margaret Clitherow, Guy Fawkes and Miles Coverdale, the translator of the bible.

Important buildings and the sites of important events have plaques, too.

So the cholera burial ground at Station Road has one; King's Manor another; Lendal Tower, Bedern Chapel, and Micklegate, Monk and Walmgate bars still more.

The Civic Trust is constantly adding to them - and as well as putting up new plaques like that at Dringhouses Library, it maintains or replaces existing ones.

One of these was the plaque which marks the pinfold, or cattle pound, in Tadcaster Road.

This was damaged and disappeared from view a few years ago - but has now been replaced, to mark the site of an important part of York's farming past.