AS WE look forward to Pancake Day, we take a look back at celebrations of the festival in the past in York.

Pancake Day, or Shrove Tuesday, is the Christian feast before the start of Lent, on Ash Wednesday.

Lent - the 40 days before Easter - was traditionally a time of fasting, with Shrove Tuesday the last opportunity to use up eggs and fats before embarking on the fast.

Pancakes were the perfect way of using up these forbidden ingredients, but as time went on, pancake making - and tossing - became ever more elaborate. The world's biggest pancake was cooked in Rochdale in 1994. It was 15 metres across, weighed three tonnes and had an estimated two million calories.

Here, in York, we used to have our own pancake marathon - a dash round the Minster with pan in hand - with one memorable entry from Dick Turpin, pictured below.

The first picture shows comedy actor Roy Kinnear, famous for appearing in comedy milestone That Was The Week That Was and films including The Three Musketeers.

Roy died in September 1988 after a film stunt went wrong, when he suffered severe head injuries in a fall from a horse in Spain while filming the last film in the Musketeer s series. Our picture was taken in the year he died, when Roy was in York for an appearance at the Theatre Royal with Hollywood legend Charlton Heston.

Updated: 10:55 Friday, February 28, 2003