As so many children of the old Dalesfolk, driven by lack of housing or the careers which higher education has prepared them for, are leaving the Dales, will the true Dalesmen die out? Will the hill farmers, who created so much of beauty in the Dales, survive in a financially hostile world?

What made them strong, resilient, stolid in the first place? From this, we cannot divorce the history and the terrain. It's clear an that an enormous amount of work has always been the lot of everyone who lived there. At first only the high ground was habitable, below was a tangle of scrub, forests, bogs, swamps, and savage wild animals. Only as tools improved did the slow work of clearance start.

Down the centuries a succession of early Britons, Danes, Norse and Romans made their mark. Without outside help the Dales became hospitable, cultivated, beautiful. Tracks became roads, much helped by the Romans. Jaggers were able to move about the country wool, coal, iron and lead. Industries were created, although their loss would be heartbreaking. Lead mining was exploited. One mine alone, at Keld Head, employed 300 men and boys and produced nearly 1,400 tons of smelted ore in a year. But foreign imports killed it all, dead. Another great success was the industry created by the monks of Jervaulx Abbey – a thriving farm industry, with the breeding of horses of fame, corn, cotton and woollen mills, harnessing the water power. Nowadays we experience the bitter loss and misery when a foreign owner closes down one or more of our factories. Long ago this happened in the dales when Henry VIII caused the ruin of the Abbey.

Another industry of promising importance was clock-making, but importation of American clocks killed that too. It seemed that whatever the Dalesfolk succeeded in building up, others would knock it down. And poverty stalked the Dales. Even in our lifetime we have stories such as that of an old lady in West Witton who lived mainly on bread and water, and for warmth in bed took three cats wrapped in hessian bags.

There is the memory of every man and woman in a community having continuously to knit, even when walking to market, hoping to get a few coppers for a garment or a pair of stockings. One woman even knitted a stocking under
the blankets every night when she went to bed. Now we have the hill farmers, struggling to survive, again through no fault of their own.

Yes, life in the Dales was harsh, but there was a community spirit: people helped each other. They descend from stock who lived in isolated communities where they had to be independent, and regarded incomers, even from nearby dales, as "foreigners". Many had not been outside their dale in their lifetime and inter-marriage was inevitable. One historian intriguingly suggested that one result was that they became "fey". In a number of villages it was believed that some men had "second sight", and would sit in their churchyards watching the spirits of those who would die before the next St Mark's Eve, making their way to the church. There was a belief in the supernatural – the appearance of a woman without a head, a disappearing lady who left a boy to lead the way for an abbot and monks, lost in the woods, the emergence of a little man in green when a railway line was laid through the burial ground at Fors, a black dog which appeared in Coverdale before a death.

In one dale there was strong belief in witches, who could appear as hares too strong to be killed, unless a silver bullet was used. Rowan trees and their wood were considered to be a protection against evil, as was a stone with a hole through it, hung in the house, or a bottle buried below the threshold containing a mixture of hair, urine and metal pins. In another dale, the thorn tree was regarded as sacred.

Has the emerging character of today's dalesfolk been influenced by past struggles? It is unlikely that they will continue to be "fey", although some do admit to be very superstitious.

In recent years an important cheese factory in the dales had been taken over by a company outside Yorkshire and decided to close it as unviable. The local people took it over and it is now successful, a lesson for consideration elsewhere.Will the same spirit save our hill farmers, or will it have to be accepted that small farms will have to be absorbed by large farms – or co-operatives? Will there be fewer flocks of sheep, to the detriment of the higher landscape? Again, outside forces threaten. But resilience continues.

Adoption of tourism is a saviour, pumped up by one man worthy of honour, calling himself James Herriot his books have brought fans from far and wide. Over the years their numbers will decrease, then what?

There are odd candle-makers, clock makers, potters, artists in glass, tag-makers in the Dales, will they lead the way to other successes? Will the greater use of computers and information technology, enabling work to be done at home, retain in the Dales more of the young people?

Will climate change (and despite it, increasing demands for water) decimate those jewels of the dales, the rivers and becks ­ and the waterfalls – and their wildlife, and the now important income derived from fishers? As fast as answers are found to some questions, other questions arise. That seems to be the pattern of life in the dales. The dalesman needs to be hardy! It is time to pay tribute to them.