Call to defend the real Yorkshire before it sinks into oblivion

Geoffrey Smith’s birthplace of Barningham, near Barnard Castle, is in Teesdale, not Swaledale as stated in your report (Yorkshire Post, May 14) on the sale of his home. The same general district is also the birthplace of Yorkshire’s best-known contemporary daleswoman, Hannah Hauxwell, who still lives there.

But in Ted Heath’s calamitous boundary reorganisation of 1974, this part of Yorkshire, along the south bank of the Tees, was transferred to County Durham. Today it is not treated as Yorkshire by organisations bearing the Yorkshire name, not least the Yorkshire Post and Welcome to Yorkshire, the tourism body.

This peerless county of ours needs to get its act together. Before the real Yorkshire sinks into the oblivion that long ago claimed Northumbria, Mercia and Deira, all who care about the county, but especially those who represent it, must strain every sinew to keep awareness of the county’s true identity alive.

Come on, Yorkshire folk. Are we content not to be able to claim as our own future Geoffrey Smiths and Hannah Hauxwells, to say nothing of Captain Cooks, since the world-famous explorer, voted by readers of this newspaper Yorkshire’s greatest individual of the first millennium, is another front-rank Yorkshire figure born and raised by the Tees?

From: Keith Jowett, Woodland Rise, Silkstone Common, Barnsley.

THE author Christopher Sommerville had some success in searching for wild places in Yorkshire (Yorkshire Post, May 16).

However, he makes the mistake of referring to the four Ridings, showing a lack of knowledge of the origin of the word Riding, which is a modern version of the Viking Threthingr – a third part.

It is true that the author Winifred Holtby wrote a novel entitled South Riding but this was a purely fictional concept, and was, in fact, based largely on the real East Riding, which was her home.

Mr Sommerville also has a somewhat hazy concept of relative sizes, saying that the North Riding is large enough to swallow up the other Ridings.

As a former geography teacher, I would have had to impose a little map copying if he had been one of my pupils.

From: Coun Chris Knowles-Fitton, Leader, Craven District Council.

THE issue of road signs highlighted by your story, and Tom Richmond’s column (Yorkshire Post, May 17), has always been a bugbear of mine. You can’t drive up the M6 without passing brown signs at every junction saying “To the Lakes”.

Perhaps signs saying “To the Yorkshire Dales” or “To the North York Moors” would better demonstrate the Yorkshire brand.

My understanding is that the Highways Agency went through a spell of allowing brown signs to all and sundry, signally failing to meet its own criteria, and there are any number of examples of this.

This lack of proper control was then followed by a near total restriction as the pendulum swung too far the other way.