One man knew him better than many: Unné's friend Norman Crossley, who was the first warden of the Yorkshire Dales National Park.

Norman is now 82 and largely confined to his house which stands on a steep hill overlooking the broad valley. He knows the Dales like the back of his hand and is proud of the fact that he once led 152 consecutive weekly walks and never repeated himself.

"I became the warden of the North Riding section of the National Park in 1964 – there were 400 applicants for the job," he says. Prior to that he had been working for a seed company.

"At that time, there were simply no houses to be found in the Dales and there were no estate agents, which is why we went to a solicitor in Hawes. The lady living in the cottage in Stalling Busk was an ex-headmistress." Sifting through a stack of letters in connection with the registering of common land, Norman came across one signed Isherwood, his mother's maiden name. Further investigations revealed his great-great grandfather was buried in the local cemetery.

Excited by the prospect of getting stuck into the new role he would be playing in the National Park, he discovered a certain vagueness about precisely what it was supposed to be. "A friend of mine was the planning officer at Northallerton and he said, 'You've got the job, now go out and make one'. It was a peculiar situation – I didn't really have a job. I got a Land Rover, but there was no money to do anything.

"I ran things with a core of voluntary wardens – 50 at the start and I ended up with 300. They didn't get anything, not even their expenses. They did it for the love of the thing. It worked. It was a very, very friendly sort of set-up.

"I had no office. I had a desk in the planning department at Northallerton and at my own expense I did up what had been an old peat store at our cottage Stalling Busk. I also had an air-raid siren I was supposed to take out on the Land-Rover in the event of nuclear attack. I don't know who was supposed to hear it.

"One of the questions visitors asked was, 'Where can we go, and what is there to do?' I composed some walks and wrote them out. There were no information centres then. We took a card table to Aysgarth car park and handed the walks out. It was a bit primitive.

"I had to make a job – and I felt the main part of it was to try and help young people. I went to schools in deprived parts of towns and arranged for them to stay in youth hostels in Keld or Aysgarth.

"I got a very poor reaction from farmers. There was hostility, some awful experiences. My wife Aileen went to a sale of household effects in the memorial hall at Bainbridge. I must have finished early that day and when I came into the back of the hall, I could see she was being bullied and harassed by local women who seemed to be saying, 'We don't want you here because you might be taking some of our bargains'! I walked to the front, I got up and gave them a piece of my mind.

"The farmers were having to come to terms with the Dales opening up, it was a difficult time of change. I can see their point of view, they had been farming in a particular way for hundreds of years and they had their own society. I had a terrible struggle with footpaths – they didn't want people on their land. But I made some wonderful friends."

Norman's limited mobility has not diminished his relish for the outdoors.

"I have my binoculars and I can see all sorts from the window. I can see the racecourse gallops above Middleham and I've got a woodpecker coming on to the bird feeder. There's also a deep gill behind the house with a waterfall where there's usually something to be seen. The thing I really like to do is get out in the Dales. But I can't do that any more." What is his favourite walk? "There are so many. Maybe Swinner Gill in Swaledale. But I might also say Gunnerside Gill – there are a lot of mining remains around there."

Norman's forays around the Dales were often in the company of a talented yet modest photographer from Harrogate called Bertram Unné. His wonderful archive of photographs has since been acquired by North Yorkshire council and is available on a website.

"He was a lonely man who lived on his own and had a one-room rented studio in Victoria Avenue in Harrogate," says Norman. "He had an old car he couldn't afford to run and the garage used to fix it for next to nothing. His father was a medical man in Harrogate and the family was highly regarded.

"Bertram was a terrible businessman and never made any money from his photographs. But he was in tune with the environment – he could see the potential in a scene and he had a very good eye for change in the Dales.

They were modernising and he recorded things before they were gone.

"I was with Bertram Unné when I discovered Hannah Hauxwell.

"We were working on the Pennine Way where I was primarily responsible for waymarking the trail. She came out to meet us wearing what was called a Harding Apron – a thing made of sackcloth to cover ordinary clothes. She was typical of an old-fashioned Dales person that I remember.

"I knew Marie Hartley and Ella Pontefract and later Joan Ingilby. They bought old Dales artefacts and because they were ladies, and it was known they had a bit of money, they used to be ripped off. So I would sometimes buy for them."

As a young man in Bradford, Norman had been smitten by the beauty of the Dales and the ways of its people from the beginning. "At Hebden, near Grassington, the Clarendon Hotel was a really rough pub. A master from our school arranged so that we could go there for threepence a night. There was a stables and a hayloft. The girls slept in the stables and the boys in the hayloft. Time after time, we went there on our bikes. There were no toilet facilities for us in the hotel. So we attached a toilet roll to a tree and had a sort of frame over it with an old mackintosh so it didn't get wet."

Later, he was smitten by the girl he was to marry and was able to bring his two loves together. "We camped when we were married in Malham Cove and there were virtually no visitors about – now it's what's known as a honey-pot. The same farming family are still there.

"We used to get eggs from them. We'd take a square of turf off and make a fire with hawthorn. We went so regularly and we weren't paying anything. So we asked the farmer what we should do and he said, 'If you can afford it, gie us a tanner now and again'. My wife lived at Clayton in Bradford and I lived at Houghton Bank Top, and when we cycled back it meant we had long hills to climb up. But Bradford's trams had space behind the driver where they let us put our bikes and didn't charge anything."

One memory of his wife stands out from the rest of one of their school expeditions. "I remember we walked down to the river and there were primroses everywhere. She was wearing my leather jacket which had lots of zips in it. She stuffed primroses in all the zips and she put some in her hair as well.

"Another lad who we knew, who was also down by the river bank, saw her and said, 'Who the bloody hell do you think you are, the Queen of the May?'"

Home thoughts sparked by a picture
A photograph in this magazine last summer of an overgrown cottage at Stalling Busk, near Bainbridge, stirred powerful memories in Norman Ayrton Crossley and prompted this letter in reply.

"Almost 50 years ago, shortly after the Yorkshire Dales National Park was established, I had the good fortune to be offered the job as National Park warden and indeed first employee. My family and I sought to purchase a property, but in those days there were few houses for sale in the Yorkshire Dales. Eventually a Mr Johnson – solicitor at Hawes – kindly rang us at our York home to say a cottage would be available in the small and remote village of Stalling Busk (Stallions Bush) originally a Norse settlement.

This fascinating cottage almost certainly on the site of a Norse "Long House" became ours. Our investigations over the years revealed an interesting history of the cottage and the village. Your photograph shows it slumbering quietly, enveloped almost totally within its screen of trees and ivy. Hopefully, it will one day be restored and awakened from its long slumber in what is certainly an 'off the beaten track' village."


Witness to a lifetime of change in rural ways
What are the main changes Norman has seen since he started out as the warden of the Dales?

"The Dales villages in my earliest memories still seemed isolated from the forces for change. Although many local industries had closed, villages remained remarkably self-contained and the pattern of life continued as it appeared to have been for decades before.

"Crafts and services ensured that many day-to-day needs of villagers could be met locally. Horses remained the main suppliers of horse power and the blacksmith was essential. With no competition from supermarkets in surrounding towns and more limited means of travel, the small local shops made villages self-sufficient to a degree difficult to comprehend today.

"Going to the market was the major weekly event. Shops and pubs surrounding the market place served mainly local needs and providing for the needs of visitors was generally a very secondary consideration.

"Fewer children in the villages today is matched by fewer farmers and farm workers in the fields. The meadows and moor lands which were once alive with the calls and activities of a farming industry seem to have been silenced.

"Throughout the Dales, when I was young were scores of chapels, meeting houses and churches which served a still strongly devout population. Today, a skeleton of this network still survives. Most redundant chapels and churches have been converted and have found a new use as holiday and retirement homes.

"At few times in the history of the Dales has there been, I would speculate, so little change to the physical fabric of the landscape as in the last three decades.

"I'd say they were surprisingly similar, yet totally transformed."

The Bertram Unné collection can be viewed online at www.northyorks.gov.uk/unnetie

• The Yorkshire Post will be producing regular features taking a walk down memory lane, revisiting some of the noteworthy figures, places and venues that have shaped our lives.

If you have fond memories of any particular character or place, then let us know so we can add it to our list of potential subjects. Email us at yponline@ypn.co.uk>>