Country & Coast: Original location of popular soap retains its quiet charm

It is here where the series was first filmed more than 40 years ago as just an everyday story of farmers and dalesfolk. Back then, the biggest drama to set viewers’ pulses racing was a few sheep being worried by a dog owned by some idiot townie.

There have been a couple of location changes since then, to the village of Esholt in the Aire Valley four years later and a purpose-built set on the Harewood estate in 1996. Meanwhile, remote Littondale - it was called Beckindale in the original series - somehow managed to survive all that prime-time fame and resume its tranquil slumber.

The metropolis of the dale is the village of Arncliffe, most of which is arranged around a long green with an impressive stone water pump dating back to mid-Victorian times.

The focal point of the scene, though, is the ivy-clad Falcon Inn, the original Woolpack in Emmerdale. Many people - myself included - would list it among their top five pubs in Yorkshire, and not just because of its time-warp interior. This is one of the few remaining pubs to draw beer straight from the cask into a jug before being poured into glasses, the way it was done for centuries until handpumps were invented.

Whisper it to friends, but the dale is perhaps the most beautiful in the Yorkshire Dales National Park. It is especially lovely in February and March on a fine day, and it would be hard to better this description by the great Marie Hartley and Joan Ingilby: “In early spring, when the grass is bitten close and wasting snow streaks the fellsides, the pastures of Littondale take on a colour unlike that of any other dale - a pale tawny, shot with olive-green and brushed with the burnt orange of bracken, against which the white of walls and scars shines out.”

You won’t find coaches in the U-shaped glacial valley, and the roads leading up from Littondale are not for faint-hearted motorists. Which is why I always think of it as mainly a walker’s dale, providing fine routes that have quite a bit of history.

The best of these routes is the Monk’s Road from Arncliffe to Malham Tarn, so-named because it was established by the lay brothers of Fountains Abbey in the long ago days when this whole area of the countryside was grazed by the abbey’s vast flocks of sheep.

You will still find peregrines here. No doubt that’s how the Falcon got its name.

There are ravens too, but the golden eagles which once nested above the village - Arncliffe is Old English for “eagle’s crag” - have long gone.

Further up the dale and the hillsides there once supported the rare lady’s slipper orchid but there are still mealy primroses, mountain globe flowers and plenty of lilies of the valley which still make this corner of Yorkshire such a delightful place to wander.