Gervase Phinn: Rugged rock appeal

Most summers the family had a fortnight in Blackpool. Apart from Christmas, this holiday held the greatest thrill for me.

It was only when I was in the sixth form studying for my A-levels, that I discovered North Yorkshire, where I was later to spend much of my working life as a school inspector. On the field study trips, organised by my geography master, the inimitable Alan Taylor, I came across the dales and the moors for the first time and the experience was unforgettable.

One memorable field trip was to Malham Cove. We had read about clints and grykes, limestone pavements and caverns, potholes and subterranean rivers in our physical geography textbook. I was not prepared, however, for what I was to see. We approached by a footpath from the south and this immense bow-shaped cove came into view like some great walled cathedral. It was breathtaking. I had never seen anything quite as bleak and rugged.

Mr Taylor had us stand beneath the towering cove and contemplate it in silence for a few moments. Then he explained that it was formed millions of years ago when the earth's crust cracked, fracturing the rock so it dropped vertically. "It's over 200 feet high," he told us, "a thousand feet wide and once a crashing waterfall cascaded over the vertical cliff, creating a fall higher than the Niagara Falls. Now can your small minds take that in?"

Another time we stayed in a youth hostel in the North York Moors. This part of England, a silent, bleak world with its great tracts of heather and bracken, fascinated me. We stayed in youth hostels and explored the incredible landscape, visited great abbeys like Byland and Rievaulx, ate our sandwiches in the shadow of lofty castles at Helmsley and Pickering, and sat in the sunshine outside local inns in villages untouched by modern life.

One weekend, Mr Taylor led us deep within the moors towards the coast at Ravenscar. The journey followed the old Viking route known as the Lyke Wake. Legend has it that the Vikings carried the lyke, or corpse, across the 40 boggy miles to the sea, where it was given up to the waves. With the coming of Christianity, the practice came to symbolise the journey of the soul towards heaven.

But back on this earth, I had never seen such magnificent scenery in my life. Beneath a shining blue sky there stretched a landscape of every conceivable colour: brilliant greens, swaths of red and yellow gorse which blazed like a bonfire, dark hedgerows speckled in pinks and whites, twisted black stumps, striding walls and the grey snake of the road curling upwards to the hills in the far distance. Light the colour of melted butter danced among the new leaves of early summer.

Now, as I reach pensionable age and have visited many parts of Britain and a goodly number of foreign places, it is the dales and the moors of North Yorkshire which still hold for me an enduring fascination.

YP MAG 27/11/10