The story of a living reservoir

FIFTY years ago, the Yorkshire Dales received their official stamp as a leisure landscape. They became a national park. Of course visitors had flocked there since trains disgorged Victorian sightseers, in whose wake came the ramblers and motoring tourists of the 20th century.

But the Dales were a playground long before that. As Colin Speakman, a leading Dales authority, points out in a new book celebrating the anniversary: "The great hunting Forests or Chases of the higher Dales were for centuries the preserve of an elite who enjoyed the hunting of wild boar and red deer."

Since the 19th century, grouse shooting has also drawn a wealthy minority, for whose pleasure the heather moors have been managed to provide a plentiful supply of birds for the guns.

"What national parks were set up to achieve, and what the Yorkshire Dales has achieved," says Speakman, "has been a democratisation of the use of this great leisure landscape. This has meant allowing everyone, not just the most privileged... to enjoy the natural beauty and man-made heritage of one of the great cultural landscapes."

Ah yes, but that "everyone" presents a problem, not so much through numbers, since the eight million or so visitors to the Dales each year are still manageable, but in what some choose to do. Like many Dales lovers, Speakman is unhappy about of-road driving, which, he says, inflicts "enormous physical damage" on the historic green lanes that are one of the Dales' most cherished features.

But besides being able to claim they are using ancient highways, the off-roaders can argue that their activity falls within a defined purpose of a national park - "to promote opportunities for the understanding and enjoyment of its special qualities".

Pitting a 4X4 against the rough Dales landscape is undeniably one way of enjoying the national park's special qualities. But had the word "quiet" qualified "enjoyment", as was originally intended, the off-roaders would be off-side. Speakman now suggests that the "recreational activities" accepted or encouraged in a national park should be those that "respect and appeciate" the natural environment.

THE off-road issue generates heat. Perhaps it will cool, in the Dales' favour, as have threats from forestry and quarrying, recalled in this golden jubilee celebration of the national park, to which Speakman contributes under the editorship of main author David Joy.

A former Dalesman editor, of Wharfedale farming stock, Joy has personally witnessed much change in the Dales over the last 50 years, during which horses have yielded to tractors, and hiring days and scythes have gone. Of the Dales at the national park's inception he remembers: "It was so quiet that the only sounds were the bleating of sheep and the calls of curlew and lapwing. There were no low-flying jets, little traffic and an almost total absence of powered machinery."

Perhaps more profoundly, most school-leavers still found work locally, often on the land. Now most young people, especially girls, leave, and many villages are half-empty in winter. Interviewed for the book (by The Northern Echo columnist Ruth Campbell) Coverdale farmer David Suttill says: "Village life is non-existent, we hardly know anyone... half the houses are only lived in as holiday cottages or second homes, we don't mix."

And yet, as Joy also observes: "The all-important factor about the Dales is not how much has changed but how little... The basic landscape has so far largely avoided ruination by modern development." Even more upbeat is novelist Jane Gardam, another contributor, who has known Swaledale for 60 years and had a cottage there for more than 20: "It is probably more beautiful now than when I saw it first."

WHO earns the credit? Of course, without its farmers the Dales would become a wilderness. But it is also the farmers who, with their acres of silage grass, give the landscape its high-summer hue described by Joy as "an unnatural vivid green... dense and all-pervading". The yield is boosted by the increased use of fertiliser that David Suttill lists among changes in Dales farming.

Only the setting up of Environmentally Sensitive Areas in 1987, with grants to support traditional haymaking, saved what was left of the glorious Dales meadows - alas too late for Wensleydale and most of Wharfedale. National park schemes to restore barns and walls have also greatly helped to retain the character of the Dales, whose protection even extends to special care with road schemes.

Above all has been the tight planning control that often infuriates Dalesfolk, even though it butters their bread by safeguarding the area's character. As Joy notes, a comparison of the national park dales with excluded Nidderdale, particularly below Pateley Bridge, is instructive.

Still, the pricing-out of locals from the housing market, creating a labour shortage that led the Hawes Creamery to import workers last year, is serious. Reviewing initiatives to ease the crisis, Joy says: "There is much that can be done to solve present problems without putting at risk the natural beauty, wildlife and cultural heritage (ie farming and community life) that originally led to the Yorkshire Dales being designated a national park."

But Joy acknowledges "vitriol" in the housing debate. An invitation to Dales children to express their ideas on their district in words and pictures, an enjoyable selection of which appears in the book, also exposed what Joy admits is "a worrying strong anti-tourist sentiment". He pertinently comments: "Here is a new generation inheriting the prejudices of the past but facing a future where the old ways cannot continue."

Yet because of its celebratory purpose the book, which includes sound-bite salutes from the likes of Alan Titchmarsh, Dickie Bird and David Hockney, avoids confronting such issues. Since the book is also definitely not a tourist guide - no portraits of individual dales or places - perhaps it would have served the Dales better by doing so.

For the message of foot-and-mouth has plainly gone unheeded. No one missed the farming products of the Dales - their milk, meat and wool. What was missed was the landscape itself, out of bounds through the closed footpaths.

A Wharfedale farmer is quoted as saying: "A countryside cannot exist just to sustain visitors." But that is the prime role of leisure landscapes now. Indeed, with ever-more foodstuffs imported, the chief value of the entire countryside might be "amenity", if only as relief from bricks and mortar as we drive around.

CALL them park-keepers, land-managers or what you will, farmers remain vital to it. With most of its excellent pictures chosen to illustrate Dales life over the last 50 years rather than show chocolate box images, this golden jubilee focus on the national park captures the Dales on the cusp of change likely to be more radical than what has taken place over the last half century.

David Joy sees farming "poised on the edge of a precipice", the collapse of which would also bring down "all that is held most dear in the Dales". To many the answer is to ease development - a call which, usually from the mouths of locals, runs almost as a subversive sub-text through the book.

But Joy and Speakman believe that patience and perseverance, allied to a sensitivity to what makes the Dales special, is most likely to secure a successful long-term future for the Dales and its 20,000 or so people, and to the wider benefit of millions more.

Putting the Dales in the context of a world wracked with tension and grappling with ever-faster change, Speakman delivers a passionate clarion call: "We need the Dales as a living reservoir of older, perhaps more permanent values... a sense of human continuity... Re-creation in the Yorkshire Dales, in the fullest sense of the word, has never been more important to us." Hopefully this anniversary tribute will win more people to that view.

* The Yorkshire Dales: a 50th anniversary celebration by David Joy and contributors (Great Northern Books, £19.99).