Malcolm Barker: Yorkshire's few remaining secrets are best kept hidden

There should not have been any surprise at the failure to come up with any great unknowns. The programme was apparently based on viewers' recommendations, and Yorkshire folk have sufficient gumption to know that a secret shared with a TV audience would be a secret no longer. The Secret Britain presenters Julia Bradbury and Matt Baker galumphing around with camera crews in attendance would soon be followed by inquisitive hordes.

The idea was no doubt dreamt up by the same BBC brains who present us with endless cookery and quizzes, also those antiques programmes which have now achieved an unparalleled degree of awfulness in Antiques Master on Monday evenings. Coming up with something really new was a forlorn hope, but at least Secret Britain was an attempt to be different, even though it ended up on fairly familiar ground.

Over the last couple of centuries of exploration and recording of the counties, no stone has been left unturned, and that almost applies literally to our beautiful limestone pavements, lattice-works of whitened stone that are the haunt of rare moths and butterflies and wild flowers. Large areas have already been ripped up to make trivial suburban rock gardens. If only their location really was "secret".

Alum Pot is so well known that most writers refer to it as being famous. Its exploration using only handlines was one of the early achievements of the Craven Pothole Club, founded in 1929, and the club eventually took a lease on the Pot. A one-armed railwayman was engaged at 7s 6d (37p) each weekend to collect entrance fees from visitors, so there was no attempt at secrecy on the part of the club. Alum Pot is an exceedingly deep damp hole surrounded by trees and open to the sun. Julia Bradbury allotted it a "Wow..."

High Force on the Tees, of which there was a glimpse, is shared by Yorkshire and County Durham. The river marks the boundary between these ancient shires. This situation was in no way varied by the local government boundaries revision of 1974, which located the waterfall entirely in Durham, as apparently does Matt Baker. He did not, however, pretend it was any kind of secret. Walter White in his A Month in Yorkshire, published in 1858, heard it while staying at a nearby inn: "Then I became aware of solemn roar – the voice of High Force in its ceaseless plunge."

White, a Londoner, was among the early chroniclers of this most written-about county. His successors are legion. Among them was Edmund Bogg, who produced a series devoted to rivers. His From Eden Vale to the Plains of York dealt with the Nidd and Ure and entailed what the author described as "a thousand miles of wandering". He had a shop selling oil paintings, water colours and picture frames in Woodhouse Lane, Leeds.

At around the same time, Harry Speight produced his Upper Wharfedale, which was published in 1900. It is an extraordinarily detailed work, and Speight claimed that "almost every parish chest and available archive, locally as well as in London, Wakefield and York, has been examined, including old Sessions' Records, Wills, Fines, Inquisitions, Pipe Rolls, Charter Rolls, Close Rolls, Patent Rolls, Chancery Proceedings, Calendar of State Papers, Heralds' Visitations… and thousands of valuable newspaper cuttings collected by me".

He also took a swipe at a fellow antiquary: "Some of the parishes and places but lightly touched on by Whitaker... I have dealt with at length." The unfortunate Whitaker, thus buried under Harry Speight's mountain of research, was Dr TD Whitaker, author of The History of Craven published in 1805 and History of Richmondshire (1823).

The diligence of Speight and his fellow writers, whose works were used for reference and freely plagiarised, meant that unknown Yorkshire virtually ceased to exist. Nearer our time, we have had Marie Hartley, partnered first by Ella Pontefract and then Joan Ingilby, who succeeded in recording the ways of life in the Dales and on the moorland that were fast disappearing on the coat-tails of progress. There was also Harry Scott with his Dalesman, and his indefatigable successor, WR Mitchell.

The work of these writers was supplemented by newspapers, notably the Yorkshire Post, that has shone light into the crannies of the county and on its people for the best part of 250 years.

In these circumstances, can secret places exist in Yorkshire? The answer must be yes. There is a strange, barely accessible stretch of cliff in the North Riding, a prehistoric fortification on the great plain of Holderness, and a remote and hauntingly beautiful old church in the West Riding. Their exact whereabouts I am not telling, not even to the loyal, and I am sure discreet, readership of the Yorkshire Post.

Major John Fairfax-Blakeborough, who did his bit in revealing Yorkshire in 112 books and countless newspaper columns, was fond of enunciating a Yorkshire maxim: "It will save you no small trouble if when speaking you take care of whom you speak, to whom you speak, and how, and when and where." Following that dictum helps preserve Yorkshire's few remaining secrets.

Malcolm Barker is a former editor of the Yorkshire Evening Post.