EVERYTHING IN A PIE

MAKE YOUR brass in the West Riding, farm in the East Riding, build your house in the North Riding. That was the old adage, and it captures part of the essence of what is called, for the time being, North Yorkshire.

That essence is one of prosperity gener- ated by outsiders and incomers landowners, mediaeval monks, modern tourists — and of what economists might call a propensity to leisure: racing and shooting for the grandees; hiking, biking, steam trains, agricultural shows and trips to the seaside for the hoi polloi. This cheerful existence as a kind of giant theme park stands in striking cdntrast to the harshness of the living offered by the soil itself, in the upland stretches of the Pen- nine dales and the North York moors which are the county's dominant feature.

There are lowlands as well, in the rich vales of York and Mowbray and the marshy vale of Pickering, but they are, frankly, boring. The villages of the region, high or low, tend to be elongated and qui- etly huddled. The real meeting-points of North Riding life — of dalesmen, sports- men, trenchermen and elderly day-trippers looking for the toilets — are its small mar- ket towns: Masham, Leyburn and Rich- mond to the west, Thirsk in the middle,

`Goodness, she's got your old face.'

Helmsley, Kirkbymoorside, Pickering and Malton to the east.

It may seem an odd reflection, but to come upon one of these towns on market day is more like being in provincial France than modern-day England. It has some- thing to do with the mellowness of the stone and the relaxed conversational ambi- ence of the market-place, but it also has to do with the quality of the food. Good and abundant eating, at plain prices, is some- thing Yorkshiremen take very seriously indeed. Competition is particularly keen in charcuterie and baking — `We like every- thing in a pie,' as my allotment-keeping neighbour, Mr Basil Bean, once remarked over the hedge.

We also like dressed crabs and fresh kip- pers from Scarborough, blue Wensleydale (greatly superior to Stilton) or its white brother eaten with hard ginger parkin, new-fangled goats' cheeses from Farndale, and Yorkshire curd tarts for tea. And in any of hundreds of comfortable pubs, the hungry farmhand can end the day with a chilli-filled Yorkshire pudding the size of a hub-cap or a well-fatted sirloin steak bigger than his flat hat, all washed down with Theakston's excellent bitter.

The farmhand's grandfather would have had to make do with a diet of fat bacon, potatoes and broth; his was a much harder life. In these same market-places, for cen- turies, workers came to the Martinmas hir- ings in November to take a 'fest' of a shilling from a farmer to signify a year's contract, which meant board, lodging and a paltry wage paid at the end. The system was supposed to have been abolished by the Agricultural Wages Act of 1924, but my old friend and gardener Ernest experi- enced it in the mid-1930s, earning f15 for the first year and £26 for the second.

A fine countryman and a walking com- pendium of folklore, Ernest Dowkes was the archetypal North Riding man. He died two years ago. 'Now then, Maatin,' he would greet me, before reciting the weath- er forecast of a local sage referred to mys- teriously as 'him from Thirsk', or launching into a stream of anecdote. I remember especially his story of a cantankerous acquaintance who fell into the stone-crush- ing machine at Hovingham quarry and was minced to a thousand pieces. 'By heck,' Ernest concluded phlegmatically, 'at least he won't have to pay t'Poll Tax.'

There are many reminders of the hard- ships of the pre-leisure age. Here in Helm- sley, now famous as one of the most sophisticated shopping experiences north of Bond Street, the block of flats next to my gate was once the Union Workhouse. Its keeper was the maternal grandfather of Huddersfield-born Harold Wilson hence, apparently, his choice of nearby Rievaulx for his lordly title.

Even at the middle level of the rural Yorkshire hierarchy — before the advent of bed-and-breakfast, caravan sites and goat's cheese enterprises — conditions were tough. Smallholders and craftsmen from the moorland dales had to go wher- ever they could to supplement their income, providing a pool of mobile labour for the rest of the county. A hundred years ago, Job Todd of Hutton-le-Hole (an all- too-picturesque village now completely overwhelmed by tourists) would walk over the Hambleton Hills — pausing no doubt, as Wordsworth did on his wedding day, to absorb the huge view across to the Pen- nines from the top of Sutton Bank — to take work 'in the bottoms' of the Vale of York in the late spring. Then, lodging rough, he would make his way up Wensley- dale to reach Chapel-le Dale, still in York- shire but 90 miles from home and barely a dozen from Morecombe Bay, in time for haymaking in July. That done, he would take the train back from Ribblehead to Kirkbymoorside in time for the harvest.

Others chose a different course and took ship from Whitby to Quebec for £3 lOs in steerage, to make a new life in Canada or Cleveland, Ohio. Or they went to the industrial sweatshops of Middlesbrough, which accounted for a quarter of the pop- ulation of the North Riding before it was hived off into a new county called Cleve- land in 1974.

Middlesbrough, once renowned for building bridges for Sydney Harbour and the White Nile, is now better known as the north-east's capital of motorised crime. Happy with our unbalanced, non-industri- al economy, that city and its charmless hinterland is quite out of character with the rest of the Riding, except perhaps the ancient river port of Yarm, which looks very much like all the other North Riding market towns. Yarm has one pleasing inci- dental claim to fame: 170 years ago, five men met in the George and Dragon inn to plan the building of the Stockton to Dar- lington line, the world's first public rail- way.

Not far south of Yarm is Northallerton, county town of the so-called county of North Yorkshire. It is another handsome old market-place astride what used to be the Great North Road, but now swamped by suburban villas and disguised for through traffic by a one-way system in which the only notable sight is the prison. Northallerton's Inland Revenue men once policed the highest average per capita income of any tax office in the country, and that wealth is reflected in County Hall itself. A handsome complex of buildings in pseudo-Queen Anne style, it is big enough to be the seat of government for a medi- um-sized country. If it becomes redundant in the forthcoming local government reor- ganisation, it would be more than ade- quate for the European Central bank.

Whatever the outcome of the Commis- sioners' work, it is hard to think of Northallerton as the heart rather than the 'Good morning, Miss Taylor — if it's not sexual harassment.' head of the county, and, indeed, is difficult to pin that heart in once place. Northaller- ton was, as it happens, almost the exact geographical centre of the North Riding, midway between Filey Brigg on the coast and Mickle Fell (now in Cumbria), 2,591 feet up in the Pennines. But it stood between two regions of quite distinctive character.

The heart of the western side, consisting chiefly of Wensleydale and Swaledale, is easily identified as Richmond. With its mil- itary associations, its hilltop castle and its sloping, cobbled market-place like a cold version of Siena, Richmond is the most dig- nified of all North Riding towns.

The eastern heart is the seat of the Lord Lieutenant, Sir Marcus Worsley, at Hov- ingham, in the lee of the Howardian Hills. The point about Hovingham is that it ele- gantly symbolises at the upper end of the spectrum the propensity to leisure which I claim as the spirit of North Riding, and which naturally infected the gentry first. Hovingham Hall was built around horses: its main entrance is an indoor riding school and it leads through the house on to one of England's prettiest cricket grounds.

Scarborough, the queen of the east coast, provides all the symbols we need at the other end of the leisure spectrum. Down on the seafront are the amusement arcades, Italian ice-cream parlours, hats that say 'Over Forty But Still Naughty' and irresistible bank holiday perfumes of fried onion and chip fat. Up at the Grand Hotel, once the biggest in Europe, now run by Butlins, elderly couples from West York- shire sip Happy Hour cocktails and wait for the ballroom dancing to begin.

Twelve and a half million leisure-seekers of every persuasion pass through the North York Moors National Park each year. Teesside bikers scream round the bends across the Cleveland Hills past pedal- cyclists looking like butterflies in fluores- cent Lycra. Caravan convoys crawl the A170 to the coast. Rich, Range-Rovered Americans arrive to shoot grouse. Bus- loads of oldies from the south complain about the café prices and ask the question the locals hate most: 'Is this Herriot Coun- try?'

But miraculously, at five o'clock, they seem to evaporate into thin air, leaving some small portion of their wealth behind — and only orrasionally, in the case of joy- riding burglars from Middlesbrough, taking some larger portion of our wealth away with them. Here in Helmsley, at least, we have the place to ourselves again by late afternoon. We can drive up to Rievaulx Moor to see the evening light in Bilsdale, or enjoy the peace of St Gregory's Minster at Kirkdale, or buy the best haddock and chips without queuing, or watch the end of the village cricket, or just go to the pub.

I sometimes worry that there might be a finer place in England to live, where the art of leisure has been developed to a higher state. But somehow I cannot imagine it.