Adventures great & small
He was raised in Scotland and doubted anywhere else had such a thing as scenery. Then the world’s best-loved vet moved to Yorkshire, and began a love affair with Dales life that spawned legendary books – and what might be the best short long-distance path in the country.
LITTLE THINGS CAN mean an awful lot. A belief in as much is probably the defining characteristic of the British temperament. It might be tea in bed, or a brave smile, or the removal of a hair ball from the fourth stomach of a farmer’s favourite heifer. Or it could be a little adventure.
One such adventure glowed in the mind of James Herriot for 20 years before he shared it with his many readers – readers who adored his ability to afford small moments of triumph and trial their full dignity; to see the transcendent in the trivial.
Since moving to Thirsk (later fictionalised as ‘Darrowby’) at the age of 23, Herriot had led a busy life as a country vet, building up scores of funny, touching stories about his many encounters with the livestock, pets and people of the Dales. By the time he was nearly 50, his wife had heard just about enough of them. It was time, said Joan (soon to be fictionalised as Helen), to tell them to a publisher instead. Borrowing a name from a footballer (vets weren’t allowed to do anything so vulgar as to advertise themselves), a career was born – one that articulated our affection for animals and animated our vision of Yorkshire as a kind of paradise. The life of Herriot along with Siegfried and Tristan spawned a dozen books, movies, a beloved BBC series that ran between 1978 and 1990, and a transatlantic hit in the shape of 2020’s new adaptation of All Creatures Great and Small broadcast on Channel 5. ▶
But he waited so long to tell the story of this particular adventure because it wasn’t one of veterinary mirth or merry mishap, but a memory just for himself. Indeed it stemmed from a time before he was ‘James Herriot’ at all – a time when he was just a capable, kindly vet called Alf Wight. It was the memory of a long weekend’s walk which his son Jim had badgered him into in the late 1950s. Because young Jimmy wanted to go Youth Hostelling.
Alf, who’d grown up camping with his red setter in the countryside around Glasgow in the thirties, suspected the idea of spending nights under a solid roof of being ‘a little effete’. But the idea of plotting a walk – a ‘magic triangle’ as he put it – between the three hostels of Aysgarth, Keld and Grinton, which yoked together some of his most beloved portions of the Dales, proved irresistible. It was to be an enjoyable trip, recounted for the first time in his 1979 coffee-table encomium James Herriot’s Yorkshire, and an account which will be familiar to anyone who’s walked a multi-day trail or in the company of teenage boys. Which is to say as full of epiphanies about food as fine views; the melancholy feeling of wearing shorts in the rain and the age-old derision at Things Dads Do. But while Wights senior and junior make for amiable company for readers – and it clearly shone in the family annals – it’s what’s become of his walk in the 60 or so years since that matters most. Because it might just have become the best little long-distance path in the country.
I say ‘become’ rather than ‘was’ because it didn’t start out precisely the same as the 52-mile Herriot Way we have now. Today it starts from a different place – Aysgarth, instead of Leyburn – and follows many fewer roads than did the vet. Partly because the roads with which he was so familiar are busier than they were in the 50s, but mainly because with a few substitutions of paths for roads the route has been dramatically enhanced. Wight, after all, was out for a long weekend’s walk casually linking farms and Dales scenes with which he was familiar and fond, not devising and writing a future Herriot Way for others to follow.
‘At times it seemed unfair that I should be paid for my work.’
That job fell to Norman Scholes, who gave the trail its name in his now out-of-print 1997 guide – a book now supplanted by Stuart Greig’s Walking the Herriot Way. Stuart walks the trail and updates his now-definitive guide every couple of years – because the last thing he wants is for anyone to be caught out as he was. “I first walked the Way in 2004 after looking for a good first long-distance path, but I got horrendously lost on the moors above Keld following the original guide. I thought ‘I could do better’.” And he did – introducing improvements to its course, and restoring the clockwise direction which had inexplicably been reversed – up Wensleydale, over the great ridgeback of Great Shunner Fell, down Swaledale and back over Whitaside Moor to close the loop. The result is really something special.
Today though two of the three hostels Wight used (Aysgarth for night one and Keld night two) are no longer part of the YHA, there are abundant places to stay en route, and in truth it doesn’t matter where you start – any more than the side from which you draw the first slice of cake. I decide to start at Castle
Bolton, the better to spend a full day in grand and gracious Wensleydale, and to make my approach to Aysgarth’s famous falls the way Wight did – under the watchful gaze of ‘majestic Penhill’.
Wensleydale is broad, beautiful, imposing – a painterly outlook watched over by the four-square, soaring, Bolton Castle. Just a few clouds, planed smooth by winds too high to touch those of us on the ground, dot the blue sky. Under foot, meadow grass, some cut and smelling sweet as tobacco. On the horizon, Penhill – long, smooth and in its handsome, mildly stepped profile, an echo of Ingleborough, which in so many views appears like the head of the Dales pride.
After a mile and a half, there’s a chance for a diversion (Wight was all for pursuing those) – and if you can resist the sign to stepping stones pointing down a path that’s itself a shallow stream bed, you’re a better man than me. I’m immediately rewarded – with the sight of a vole swimming across the inch-deep water, and a bright-eyed baby rabbit with body the size of an orange hopping and bucking down the path in ten-yard bursts ahead of me. It’s a worthy 30-minute detour, to cross and re-cross stepping stones the size of ram-raid deterrents, which form a graceful arc across the wide clear water of the Ure.u
‘No animal is a better judge of comfort than a cat.’
A mile further and there’s another impressive water feature at Aysgarth, where in a short distance the normally placid Ure drops 200ft in a series of startling, broad falls, more Canadian than British. It was a favourite spot of Wight’s: ‘The upper falls are the ones I like best; where I have taken my children since babyhood and where I have returned with fresh enchantment so many times over the years.’ Like so many of the fields – ‘the vet’s operating table’ – where he stitched a teat or birthed an awkwardly-lying foal, it’s a place that triggers a very specific memory: ‘On the corner of a hill a stone parapet curves above the river and I gazed at it, as I always do, with affection. Many years before, my brakeless car decided to stall on that hill and ran backwards at an alarming speed till it crashed into the parapet. That little wall is only about 18 inches high but it probably saved my life.’
Wight had what he called a ‘verbatim memory’ – photographic recall for the things people said – which was vital for the tales that filled his books. He’d been in practice for 30 years before the first,
If Only They Could Talk, was published. But as well as stories, it was the substance of the Dales – the sights, the smells, the serenity – that was seeping into his pores as he plied its lanes from farm to farm. It’s every atom as beautiful, seductive and unspoilt today.
Between Aysgarth and Hawes the path follows a delightful quiet route from meadow to meadow, emphasising one of the benefits of not being an official National Trail. Each corner feels like a discovery, not the turning of a well-thumbed page. Through little slots in walls closed with apron-sized swing gates I pass – so many hay meadows, growing what looks like a cordon-bleu crop of winter feed for the sheep grazing high on the Dale’s sides, and drinking (as they appear mainly to do in Wensleydale) from old baths.
‘One of the exquisite pleasures of the north Pennines is passing from dale to dale, the looking back and the eager anticipation of the unfolding beauty to come’ wrote Wight of his journey’s next leg, and your heart will return an echo. ‘That was how it should have been that day…’ But a chill dampness was gathering in the air, and Wight’s route into Swaledale went directly over the moor of Askrigg Common on the road. As if to punish that unimaginative choice, the party were met with a deluge that never let up. Wight – in shorts, rain flooding down his neck despite an ineffectual cape – didn’t like getting wet, generally preferring ‘to dive into a barn at the slightest shower’.
But ‘Here the graciousness and softness of Wensleydale was far away and an empty vastness stretched to the horizon’.
Today the Herriot Way takes a much superior route to Keld, heading to the head of the valley at Hawes before hopping onto the aerial highway that is the Pennine Way over Great Shunner Fell. This is a lovely drove road – high, durable, great for making progress on, today accompanied with the brief spectacle of a lapwing, crest iridescent in the sun, swiping its broad wings while firing malfunctioning-robot noises in artful distraction from its nest. Up here you register the scale of the Dales. This is grand country, suggestive of long journeys and limitless prospects. It’s the longdistance path mood captured in a few short miles.
In the approach to the summit the path turns briefly beachy, a few soft kicks of buff sand feeling fittingly summery. From the cross-shaped shelter, with its comfy rock-supported benches, you have a 360 degree panorama of what with the haze’s help, looks an infinity of dappled Dales. It’s a shame Alf – who said he’d ‘spent a good part of my life – probably too much – in just standing and staring”
‘If a farmer calls me to a sick animal, he couldn't care less if I were George Bernard Shaw.’
– missed this. But he knew the feeling: ‘The peace which I always found in the silence and emptiness of the moors filled me utterly’.
The descent toward Keld is full of interest – a superbly elegant ‘beacon’ cairn, the path beyond becoming a thread then vanishing in the distance as it curves towards voluptuous, lush Swaledale, and halfway down a plump heap of spoil the last trace of the old Stockdale colliery, abandoned nine years before Wight arrived in the Dales.
But the best is still to come as the dominant colour changes from the tawny of the moor to the green of the barn-dotted pastures, alive now with a billion buttercups. And here the Herriot Way takes an ingenious turn. Instead of taking the obvious valley path from Thwaite toward Keld, it rides the coat-tails of the Pennine Way just far enough to join the bridleway over the potted peak of Kisdon. It’s an
inspired detour. From the slope back you can see just how many fields the hillsides are parcelled into – dozens in view without turning your head, five fields deep up the hillside to the skyline. And then the Ways part – Pennine and Herriot taking different sides of the hill, and the latter getting the better of it. Walking over the saddle of the hill on beautiful near-virgin turf, positively surfing the last mile or so of the walk home in grand style, it’s rather like walking a box-fresh stretch of the Pennine Way, in the summer before opening day, in 1965.
The Wights, by contrast, arrived in Keld sodden and a little downtrodden. But next morning, ‘Hoisting our rucksacks onto our backs we stepped out into a different world. The sun shone, a few white clouds drifted over a canopy of blue, and how can I describe the first breath of scented air? Whenever I return to the Dales after a holiday, the first thing I notice is the Dales smell – and this
morning after all the rain it was multiplied. A great wave drifting over the miles of grass, carrying the fragrance of moorland turf, wild flowers and every growing thing. It lapped us as we walked down into the village.’
Their onward route led them up pretty Swinner Gill and over Melbecks Moor to Gunnerside Gill. ‘We didn’t hurry’ says Wight; ‘but lay down often on the springy turf, heads on our rucksacks, and took the sun on our faces as we gazed around us at the wonder of these grassy uplands.’ Today the Herriot Way offers two choices – to extend the high route the Wights took, all the way to Reeth, or to follow the course of the Swale. One magnetic to connoisseurs of moorland and mining ruin (touchingly, Wight wrote of this area ‘It seemed to me that I could never be unhappy here, or plagued by the little worries of the world’), the other a constant come-hither to paddlers (and a detour to Kisdon Force is surely a must). Either way you end up in Reeth, where – across a distance of six decades – you can share an ice-cream with the Wights, from the unmissable shop on the far side of the green. In fact it was in a back street in Reeth, many years later, Wight would have the uncanny experience of meeting himself as played by Christopher Timothy, being filmed for the TV series. It was before the programme had first aired, and though the meeting between alter egos was cordial, it was Robert Hardy (Siegfried) who Alf was most excited to meet.
Wight’s last night was to be spent in mile-distant Grinton Lodge, the castle-like Youth Hostel at the edge of the limitless heather moorland of Harkerside, Whitaside and Apedale. It’s 14 miles in all back to Aysgarth and the modern start/finish, but the Wights, ‘laughing together over the events of the weekend’ were bound for Leyburn. For them it was the end of ‘a wonderful Pennine walk’. For me, the last leg of what is surely among the great little longdistance paths of the world, combing a sense of grand adventure with the convenience of a circular route that fits into a long weekend, the wildness of the uplands with the sheer comeliness of the villages.
I’ll leave Alf where I think he would be happiest, at ‘a place I always stop at’ – lying in the heather near Grinton Lodge looking over beautiful, sunlit Reeth and the two long arms that reach behind it, one to Swaledale, the other to Arkengarthdale. ‘I am a confirmed heather lier’ confirmed Wight. ‘They talk a lot about pocket spring mattresses these days, but give me a good bed of heather, especially when the ripe blooms are pushing their fragrance into my face, the sun is bright and there is something like Reeth to fill the eye’. Which is the kind of thing that makes me want to walk not just The Herriot Way, but to walk the Herriot way always.
‘If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans.’