There's no place like home

Stuart Reid is blown away by the Yorkshire Dales Hang the expense, I thought. Let's take a holiday in England. After all, I speak the language and understand many of the cultural references; and my wife is a good driver.

So come on, Google, what you got cooking? Here we are: the Marriott Hotel Royal County in Durham, quite a nicelooking joint. Double room with breakfast: £140 a night midweek. Blimey. In real money, that's about €210. You'd get five stars on the Via Partenope in Naples for that sort of dosh.

But there is more to life than Italy, or so they say. It was time for a leap of faith: my wife and I stuffed our wallets with credit cards, packed the Micra and lit out for Yorkshire.

It turned out to be a grand idea. The moors and the dales left us gabbling and grinning for joy. It was the discovery of a lifetime. Who needs the Apennines when you've got the Pennines?

Getting there is far from being half the fun, of course, unless you are among the super-rich and can afford the train, but it is not too much of a slog. If you avoid unnecessary detours and arguments, it takes four and a half hours to drive from London to Thirsk, on the edge of the North Yorkshire Moors.

Thirsk is an honest sort of place, pretty but not twee, and is a good base for exploring this part of the world. The market sells traditional produce: fruit and vegetables, anoraks and air-fresheners, boogie boxes and CDs. The grub here is good and simple, as it is all over the North. At the White Horse Café, you get delicious haddock, chips, mushy peas, sliced bread and marge and a pot of tea for £6.80. The girls who served us were sweet, and not too switchedon. When asked (not by us) whether the bill included service, one of them said, a little suspiciously, 'What do you mean?'

We stayed at Oswald's, a boutique hotel just outside the town that I'd discovered on the net. Instead of booking online, however, I rang the hotel and negotiated a special deal: £75 bed-and-breakfast. My wife and I liked the place. We banged our heads a couple of times on a low-flying beam, but — no pain, no gain.

From Thirsk we went for the afternoon to Castle Howard, the baroque masterpiece that was the setting of the television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, and then moved on to Ampleforth (£28 a night B&B). I had been there before, as a pupil in the late 1950s. As we approached the abbey, the sun was setting in a sensational display of red, orange, purple, rose, crimson, turquoise and slate. It was stinging cold, and that night the sky was full of stars.

In the Ampleforth bookshop I bought a DVD about the Shroud of Turin*. It is a persuasive film and was made by Fr Martin Haigh, who in 1959 showed me great kindness by giving me 20 Players when I fell out with the school authorities — much as David Cameron did in 1982 — and was banged up in the Infirmary.

Fr Martin was as kind as ever, and charmed the socks off my wife, but much had changed. Latin no longer holds sway. In the bookshop Edith Piaf's 'Non, Je Ne Regrette Bien' was playing, and a monk was gamely singing along, in English. Two other golden oldies followed (but to no accompaniment) — 'Lipstick On Your Collar' and 'Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy'. We did, however, hear some plainsong, at Vespers. This ancient ritual is sublime, and obviously far better for body, mind and spirit than a detox session at some organic health farm. It is also free at the point of delivery.

The sun had been shining for three days now, and it was shining on the fourth when we drove across the North Yorkshire Moors to steep and spooky Whitby. The ruined abbey — scene of the Synod and monument to Henry VIII's vandalism — was closed, alas, but we climbed up to the headland where it stands and watched wild surf advancing on the beach at West Sands. Can you ride the waves? Sure, said the young man in a Belgian chocolate shop above the beach. In summer the weather is pretty good. I bought some treacle toffee. The young man seemed a bit sad, or maybe he was bored. He told us he'd been making luxury chocolates for five years, but his own preference was for Twix and Snickers.

Whitby was exhilarating, but we hadn't seen anything yet. Sometimes only the language of teenage girls will do. Our next drive — across the Yorkshire Dales to the Lake District — was awesome. 'Why didn't anyone ever tell me about this?' I cried. Nothing had prepared me for this huge rolling landscape with its olive greens, chocolate browns and straw yellows, its drystone walls and clear, tumbling, pebbled streams. I got butterflies; I was in love.

In biscuit-tin terms, the Lake District is even sexier, of course; but it did not match the Dales for drama and poignancy. The mountains are majestic — and the walks invigorating and improving — but Grasmere, where we spent the night, is good taste gone mad. Wordsworth, one felt, had done nothing to deserve the cottage industry that has sprung up in his name.

By day five — Wednesday of last week — the BBC was full of terrible warnings about hazardous driving conditions. For our journey south across the Dales to Bradford (where I spent the first year of my life) we did the sensible thing and packed bottled water, Wellington boots, a spade, glucose tablets, a portable radio, a pump-action shotgun, a distress rocket, two prayer mats, a tin of boiled sweets and a torch.

But we needn't have bothered. The journey was bleak rather than dangerous. I would have welcomed a bit of winter misery drama. The sunny mood of the start of the holiday disappeared in the sleet and snow. We got lost near Crackpot in Swaledale. We argued.

I stared out of the window at the shivering sheep and reflected that this was why people went on holiday to Provence and Tuscany, to Andalusia and the Western Cape, even, when no one is looking, to South Beach, Miami. It's the weather, crackpot. Still, I would not have swapped my week in the North for . . . for the world. And it hadn't been too bloody expensive.

*The Wonder of the Shroud. Go to www.ampleforthcollege.york.sch.uk and click on the link to the shop.