Carol Drinkwater: Carol's voyage of oil exploration... and the forces that threaten her own idyll

It's a sentiment that Carol Drinkwater would probably agree with, having spent 16 months journeying round the Mediterranean in search of

the ancient secrets of the olive tree, which she recounts in her new book.

Return to the Olive Farm is the sixth installment of the hugely successful series following her family's life on their olive farm in Provence. Her quest to uncover the roots of the olive tree took her through Spain, Sicily, Italy, Morocco and Algeria and her book, like its predecessors, is part travelogue and part memoir.

It sounds like the kind of meandering journey that makes you green with envy, although it was far from plain sailing. Carol found herself caught up in war zones dependent on complete strangers for shelter and witnessed the grinding poverty endured by many farmers in North Africa. While in Andalucia, she discovered the clamour for bigger, better crops had led to the over-watering of olive trees to produce more fruit which was slowly turning the region into a desert. If that wasn't enough, when she finally made it back to her home in France, she discovered that the bee colony which regularly wintered there had been decimated, poisoned by insecticides.

For Carol, it has been a challenging couple of years during which she's been unable to produce her own olive oil and faced numerous trials and tribulations which have threatened to ruin her dream of running her own organic farm.

She admits that her latest journey affected her deeply. "My editor says that I went away a writer and came back an ecologist," she says jovially. "Ever since I was at drama school, I've been going on about the importance of environmental issues, about organic farming and looking after animals, but it was just a vague understanding. And now I've seen at a grass roots level how we have radically changed, quite literally, the face of the Earth."

Her travels have opened her eyes to the dangers of over-farming. "The world has become accustomed to bigger, better, crops and we have this notion of 'feeding the world', which of course we should, but it's a bit of a con when you look at how much food is wasted."

She is concerned, too, about the knock-on effect this is having on nature. The plight of honey bees has become a fashionable dinner party topic in recent years but having seen the devastating impact it had on her own farm, Carol believes it's an issue that urgently needs to be addressed.

"About a third of the world's honey bee population has been wiped out in the last eight years, which is a phenomenal figure. Einstein said that if bees were wiped out we would have no fruit, vegetables, or flowers within four years, so it's a critical situation," she says. "We have 14 hives which belong to Francois who works on our farm and these were decimated. We think that two pesticides used on some flowers may be responsible, although it could also be a combination of things including loss of habitat and a lack of bio-diversity."

Carol's book deals with the dilemma facing would-be organic growers who have to weigh up the costs involved and the likelihood of smaller harvests. "How do you live your life and your idyll if your idyll demands you do something that goes against your conscience? That's what the book is about – to what extent can you live a dream and what price are you prepared to pay for it," she says. "I'm very privileged because I can afford to make this stand and I realise this isn't the case for a lot of farming people. For me, it's not about money, it's about the principles, but I recognise that I don't need to produce olive oil in order to pay the mortgage and a lot of people do."

It's more than 25 years since Carol last appeared on our screens as Helen Heriot, wife of vet James, in the much-loved BBC series All Creatures Great and Small, and it's almost as long since she and her husband Michel, a French television producer, first laid eyes on their future home in Provence. "You couldn't even see the olive trees it was so overgrown," she recalls. "At the time I had no interest in getting into olive farming. I just wanted a place by the sea where I could chill out between acting jobs."

It was a hard slog to create their little piece of paradise. "It took about seven years before it became properly habitable. We used to sleep on a mattress on the ground and get water from the village, we had a very basic existence for quite a long time."

Gradually, though, she found herself beguiled by the Mediterranean landscape and its enduring symbol. "The olive tree has an incredibly complex history, it goes back to the time of the Greeks, the Phoenicians and the Romans. It was taken to North Africa where it was exchanged for goods from Asia and it's fascinating because its history is linked to the history of modern western civilisation."

Carol describes her journey round the Mediterranean as a "life-changing" experience. "I'm not an archaeologist, or an ecologist, I'm just an ordinary woman who set out to try to find the source of the olive tree in what is one of the most beautiful places in the world." Beautiful and, at times, dangerous.

"I spent about three-and-half weeks in Algeria when there were al-Qaida bombs going off everywhere, which was pretty scary. But Algerians are the most extraordinary people, they share everything they have, which isn't much, and it was a humbling experience." She was only able to continue her journey thanks to the assistance of a network of beekeepers. "They had this extraordinary telegraph system where they parcelled me across the country from one beekeeper to another. They looked after me otherwise I would have been dead," she says.

As well as making her a best-selling author, Carol's olive farm books led to her working with UNESCO to help set up an Olive Heritage Trail in the Mediterranean and she's now working on a documentary series inspired by her travels.

Despite this, she regards herself as an actress and author, rather than an environmentalist and says she would jump at the chance of doing more television work.

"The problem is there aren't many decent roles for actresses and those there are go to Helen Mirren," she says, laughing.

"But if something like that (the part of Helen Heriot] came

along, then I would put everything else on hold."

She calls All Creatures Great and Small a "TV classic" and has fond memories filming in the verdant hills around Askrigg. "I'm not someone who really has regrets but if I had my time again I wouldn't have left the show. I did at the time because I was eager to get on with other things but looking back I feel I could have done both."

She plans to take a break from her olive farm series and has begun writing a fiction trilogy, but insists it's not the end of her Provence books. "There definitely will be more because it's about my life and things are constantly happening, so it's not the last chapter."

But although she loves returning to Yorkshire she

doesn't intend to swap the Cte d'Azur for Filey in the foreseeable future. "I'm a bit of a lizard and you can't really be a lizard in Yorkshire, although I hear the weather's been lovely there recently. Perhaps after a few years of global warming, Yorkshire might be like Provence." Now there's a thought. Olive groves in the Dales.

Return To The Olive Tree is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, priced 18.99. To order a copy from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call free on 0800 0153232 or go to www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk. P&P is 2.75.