An Impression Of Rural Yorkshire
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PA with friends at Easter Grotto, Easegill Caverns, many years ago
What a wonderful County North Yorkshire is: it has everything. I first came to know the County as a student. I joined a potholing club, and explored the caves in the Yorkshire Dales. What an adventure for a young man! Narrow twisting stream passages emerging into huge Ice Age caverns, with grey rock sometimes decorated with almost transparent glossy white formations, smoothe as marble, or plunging into vertical descents of enormous ladder or rope pitches with depths exceeding a hundred foot, or crawls sometimes interrupted by the strenuous challenge of the ultimate squeeze, which were always a good laugh.
You had to walk up the fell to get to the cave entrance - sometimes for several miles - and so I soon learnt to love the Yorkshire Dales and its wonderful scenery. I decided that one day I would live and work in the County, and eventually I ended up working for Ryedale District Council as their solicitor in 1988.
Ryedale is different from the Yorkshire Dales. The scenery is not so spectacular, but we have the North York Moors, and the seaside resorts of Scarborough, Whitby and Bridlington are not far away. The North York Moors preserved steam railway is one of the longest in the country with some of the best views. The setting of preserved railway and bleak moorland is perfect for the Heartbeat series.
There is no shortage of things to see and do. There are the cliffs on the Yorkshire East Coast like the Bempton Cliffs off Flamborough Head, where many kinds of sea birds make their nests. Sailors can see them dive into the sea, coming up with fish and sometimes flapping wildly over the waves, as they try to take off whilst almost overburdened with their catch. Sailing is a wonderful way to observe nature. In my boat, we often see seals and porpoises - to say nothing of the swarms of jellyfish with their evil looking tentacles, which infested the sea in summer last year.
The Ryedale countryside is well suited for horses - a mix of flat plains and gently rolling hills, where the hunts can gallop across open farm land; racing stables thrive, and the York race course is not far away.
Ryedale and its neighbourhood is not short of history: there are the obvious attractions of York, but even some villages have their own castles. Some people say that King Richard ruled England from Sherriff Hutton! There are the ruins of the great mediaeval abbeys; King's Manor in York, once the home of the Abbot of St. Mary's Abbey, then the headquarters of the Council of the North, and more recently part of York University. Ryedale even has one of the country's premier stately homes at Castle Howard - an interesting mix of a very original Georgian style, classical statues, sweeping well-kept landscapes rising over an artificial lake, and an intriguing castle and pyramid theme for the approaches.
The best of rural Yorkshire is in the people living here. They may watch their brass, but they are nearly all polite, tollerant and friendly. The children at school are some of the best behaved in the country - there is never a shortage of teachers here. If it wasn't for the underlying rural poverty, Ryedale would be a rural paradise. Newcomers don't want to leave - not even for a better paid job. Public servants have a name for the County: they call North Yorkshire the "Graveyard of Ambition"
The Colonades under Lancaster Hole |