THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 31, 1995 TAG: 9512290083
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY STEPHEN HARRIMAN
LENGTH: Long : 237 lines
SO ENDS another year of travel . . . so comes a time, in the familiar comforts of home with family and friends, for some recollections, some reflections on global hopping.
I hope that you have enjoyed traveling vicariously with me and a host of fellow writers as we have tried to tell you what it's really like ``there.''
People often ask me what has been my favorite place. That is hard to say. First of all, I don't go to any place unless I think I will find it at least somewhat pleasant and interesting. Would you? Second, I can't really say anywhere in particular until I have been everywhere.
At the moment - if choose I must - I am thinking fondly of the Yorkshire Dales in the north of England. I will tell you why in a minute, but first let me explain why the choice is difficult.
My personal sojourns this year have taken me from Austria to Zimbabwe, from Amsterdam to Zurich, from Nice to Bad Ischl. I have seen to peaceful Aare River and the raging Zambezi - and, thinking back on the latter, I may have witnessed the most memorable sunset in the history of mankind from a small boat in the middle of the Zambezi in the company of elephants, hippos and crocodiles.
In Panama, thanks to a geographical twist, I watched the sun rise over the Pacific and set over the Atlantic.
I saw what was left of two of the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World in Turkey and traveled through two of the world's modern engineering wonders - the English Channel Tunnel and the Panama Canal.
The thundering spectacle of Victoria Falls left me convinced that there are no words to describe Southern Africa's great natural wonder, but I was also spellbound as I stood in the ghostly mist of Reichenbach Falls, where Sherlock Holmes engaged in mortal combat with the dastardly Professor Moriarty.
(You may THINK the latter is only a well-crafted tale, but try to convince yourself of that as you stand in a chilling blast of air looking down from the little bridge above the falls just a few feet above the rushing water that was snow only an hour ago.)
I heard spoken at least 14 languages or dialects as I visited 19 countries, 12 for the first time, on four continents. That brings my personal country-collection total to 35. It's not very many, really, considering there are 187 countries represented in the United Nations plus a few more that aren't. But it's a start.
As best I can calculate I traveled 81,180 air miles on 45 flights in 24 different types of aircraft, not counting several African bush planes I could not identify. In addition, there was another 6,025 miles by train, which took me, among other places, from 110 feet beneath the English Channel to 11,333 up the Jungfraujoch in the Swiss Alps to the world's highest station; 2,900 miles by ship; 1,750 by bus; and 5,000 by automobile.
I crossed the equator and found that, in the Southern Hemisphere, water does indeed circulate in the opposite direction (counter-clockwise) as it drains from a sink. When I crossed the mid-Pacific International Dateline headed west I completely lost a Friday, but on returning a week later I got a partial payback: two Saturday sunrises and two Saturday sunsets.
Isn't travel amazing?
You may know the Yorkshire Dales, the place I mentioned earlier, without even realizing it. This is Herriot Country, home of ``All Creatures Great and Small.''
James Herriot is dead now, but still they come here - devoted readers of his many memorable tales, viewers of the television series based on his writings - still they come in search of the essence of Herriot Country.
James Herriot never existed, except in spirit. The stories, based on very real people and places and creatures great and small, are those of James Alfred ``Alf'' Wight, born a Scot but forever associated with England's North Yorkshire country, where he came as a young man, where he lived and wrote and practiced veterinary medicine for years (mostly near Thirsk) and where he was buried in February of this year.
``I was always aware of the beauty around me and had never lost the sense of wonder that had filled me when I had my first sight of Yorkshire,'' Herriot wrote in ``Every Living Thing.'' ``My eyes strayed again and again over the towering flanks of the fells, taking in the pattern of the walled green fields won from the yellow moorland grass, and I gazed up at the high tops with the thrill of excitement that always came down to me from that untrodden land.''
The Yorkshire Dales are not really spectacular - not as compared to, say, most of Switzerland or parts of Austria - but scenic enough to have attracted J.M.W. Turner, Britain's greatest landscape artist, on four extended sketching and painting tours throughout his lifetime.
I think I would have enjoyed traveling with Turner. I like his style. Not his painting, although that is certainly admirable, but this: When the weather was bad he worked under an umbrella, and when it was not bad the umbrella converted to a fishing rod.
I find the dales to my liking because it is a comfortable, cozy, homey place where the people are warm and friendly . . . and hard as horseshoes. And it's not over-run by other travelers. That sort of place is becoming more and more difficult to find.
It is rural hill country, beautifully rounded valleys and beautifully mostly rounded but occasionally jagged hills, all of it created by glacial activity during the Ice Age. The valleys (called dales) all have names today - Swaledale, Wensleydale, Ribbledale, Wharfedale, Coverdale and a few others - and each is said to have its own ``personality.''
And the dales are surprisingly easy to negotiate. Every map of the region I've seen seems to greatly exaggerate distance. Actually, the most convoluted journey through the dales might require no more than a day's drive - although I'd certainly recommend taking longer.
The idyllic valleys resemble swelling seas of vivid green on which grey-white sheep with black faces seem to float. High up on the hills, the empty, treeless moors are too bleak, too barren, for most people, but I find them, with their pure air and little rocky streams, peaceful and tranquil.
The Romans came here, mostly because they were ordered to, and drove their ruler-straight roads across the hills. The Angles, Danes and Norsemen came in their turn with settlement in mind. Norse terms, in particular, have been a part of the local language since the 9th century: a dale is a valley, a fell is a mountain or hill, a force is a waterfall, a keld is a spring.
The Middle Ages brought the Normans, who built castles and created hunting forests, and the Cistercian monks, who built great abbeys, farmed vast estates, made cheese (a wonderful descendant is Wensleydale) and bred hardy sheep that could live on the inhospitable fells.
But generally, the area was not, and still is not, sufficiently prosperous to merit unnecessary ostentation, so functional rather than fancy is the keynote both in lifestyle and austere architecture - homes and often-attached barns with sturdy graystone walls, roofs made from sandstone ``slates,'' traditional mullioned windows and date-stone door lintels.
This much more I can say with certainty: on a mild, sunny day in August, it is a wonderful, restful place to be. Here, I feel as if I am on holiday.
We are headed for a place called Starbotton, a tiny Wharfedale village just north of Kettlewell. It is a journey that, one learns, must be unhurried.
The roads of the dales are narrow, twisting, climbing, plunging, with close-by, gray-brown stone walls on either side, intricate and lichened, lumpen as fallen cakes, higher than a car as a rule, benignly threatening, unforgiving to sculpted sheet metal. One must pay attention.
The singular striking feature of this country is these drystone walls, many dating from 200 years ago when farmland was first being enclosed, the result of thousands of bent backs and lifts and carries and stacks to make this land orderly and workable.
Built without mortar, the rough boulders and angular stones were fitted in place by skilled wallers and held together by gravity. The free-standing stones can expand and contract in the changing temperatures without causing damage. I've heard that a pair of wallers, working both sides, could build about 12 yards a day, from a base generally about two-and-a-half feet wide to a height something over five feet.
They appear inseparable from the land, having been there so long that they'd taken roots and spread out on their own accord. They march stalwart and straight - by the left, now. . . MARCH! - as if files of grenadiers on parade. They cross and crisscross the undulating emerald carpet with mysterious geometry, dividing this plot from that in some unfathomable order.
Bushey Farm Lodge is both a bed-and-breakfast establishment (a pair of delightful guest rooms with baths, painstakingly decorated) and a working livestock farm, run by Rosie and Ken Lister. We picked it at random from a Farm Holiday Bureau brochure.
Delightful place - the house and barn dating from the 15th and 16th centuries, Rosie said, but much modernized - and easy enough to find. Starbotton is about as big as a minute.
Wharfedale is a typical glaciated valley: U-shaped with steep-sided fells showing long limestone scars, like bones poking through green skin, and a flat floor with a small, shallow stream - grandly called the River Wharfe - strewn with the rocky rubble carried here long ago by the now-vanished ice.
Ken and his brother are transferring bales of brown barley straw from a flatbed lorry and stacking them in the old barn. We peer into the semi-darkness. There are tufts of dirty sheep's wool on the cobbled floor. The smell is . . . well, the smells of nature.
Turning my back on manual labor, which I am not good at, I am drawn, as if by some force I cannot explain, down a rough farm lane - stone walls enclosing black angus on the left, an overgrown brook on the right - down toward the River Wharfe and something beyond the tree-shaded banks that I cannot quite identify.
My imagination is telling me that just over there, the two gray shapes - one small and rectangular, the other a large, eliptical mound - against the rising green backdrop of the fell mark some ancient pagan ritual site.
As I pass through a wooden stile where pasture meets river bank, and cross the clear-running stream on sun-dappled stepping stones, the mystery halfway vanishes.
The rectangular feature is clearly the tumbled remains of a small stone building of some sort, no more than eight feet by eight feet, hardly big enough for a barn. Maybe a cottage, maybe a shepherd's shelter.
But the big mound of gray-brown stone beyond? I am beginning to think it is just that, a byproduct of field clearing, and nothing more when it BEGINS . .
Quick-witted former country boy that I am, I fairly quickly realize that the mound, whatever it once was, was now home to hundreds it not thousands of rabbits. Hares, actually.
Hares are like rabbits, only bigger.
These were not your basic fluffy little lettuce-munching Peter Rabbits from Beatrix Potter's place over in the Lakes District. These were big brown things with really long ears, rangy and lean, hardy and hard-working field stock. For all I know, they could be attack hares.
I back off, thankful they aren't the ghosts of Druids or something.
Ah, you can't beat this country life.
At breakfast - a proper English breakfast of cereal and milk, fried eggs, fried lean bacon, remarkably good fried sausage, fried bread, fried tomatoes plus bread and butter and jam, tea and coffee - we meet our fellow lodgers, a couple from Norfolk . . . England.
They're strawberry farmers in that flat county an hour's drive northeast of London. They've been here before, love the dales.
He speaks of a wonderful walk up over the fell to the west where I had gone the evening before. Not too strenuous, he says. Leads down into Littondale to the village of Arncliffe.
The Yorkshire countryside is a casual walker's paradise, to be sure, crisscrossed by an extensive web of footpaths, bridleways, country lanes and walkers' rights-of-way.
I see the footpath on map; I also see that a road goes there. ``Not too strenuous'' is in the legs and lungs of the beholder. We went by car.
Arncliffe is a lovely little place - quaint ancient stone houses nestled among clumps of sycamores and surrounding a quiet village green. Few tourists venture this far. The pastoral peace is unspoiled.
There are two other must-visit centers in the dales.
Hawes, the principal market town of Wensleydale, is the center of Wensleydale cheese production and one of the few places where rope is still made the old-fashioned way. This was a very big deal when Britannia ruled the waves.
Lovers of all creatures great and small will want to visit Askrigg in Wensleydale. Herriot always said that ``Darrowby'' was not one place but a sort of composite of Thirsk, Richmond, Middleham and Leyburn, but Askrigg provided a suitable location for television's version of Darrowby.
I mentioned earlier the contributions of other writers whose efforts during '95 have helped, I hope, to make the reading of these travel pages an enlightening and enriching experience for you. In particular . . .
Fellow staff writers took us to the mountains of Vermont and Utah for skiing and snowboarding (Mike Mather), Amelia Island, S.C. (Carl Fincke), lovely Edenton, N.C. (Mark Kozak), the Walt Disney Magic Kingdom for adults (Mal Vincent), trekking through Central America (Lise Olsen), an archaeology quest in Caesarea, Israel (Dave Addis), the North Carolina Outer Banks (Lane DeGregory) and through Central Virginia tracing Lee's Retreat (Earl Swift).
Former staffers took us on an Elderhostel trip through Sicily (Cammy Sessa), to off-the-tourist-track sites in Venice (Mike D'Orso) and to Syria, Budapest and the California Coast (all by Greg Raver-Lampman).
A couple of local free-lancers shared their somewhat exotic adventures with us: Moira Wright Bodner on her climb, almost to the top, of Mount Rainier, and writer-photographer Scott Shelton on his visits to Burma (now called Myanmar by its military rulers), Vietnam and Bangladesh.
And free-lancer Sherrie Boyer (wife of staffer Tom Boyer), staff writer Christopher Dinsmore and staff photographer Jim Walker gave us the full flavor of Acadia National Park in Maine.
We have much more planned for you in '96. Happy New Year . . . and bon voyage.
MEMO: For information on the Yorkshire Dales and other regions throughout the
United Kingdom, contact the British Tourist Authority, 551 Fifth Ave.,
Suite 701, New York, N.Y. 10176-0799; the BTA now has a toll-free
information line, 1-800-462-2748, staffed weekdays from 9:30 a.m. to 7
p.m.
by CNB