Gervase's own country

EACH person's Yorkshire is different. That's because we all have our own unique memories of the places we love, which shape the way we see them. So Fred Trueman's Yorkshire is different to Bernard Ingham's; Michael Parkinson's to James Herriot's.

Now Gervase Phinn, popular author of the best-selling Dales books, has brought out a book about his own Yorkshire.

Published by the Dalesman, the book is entitled - appropriately enough - Gervase Phinn's Yorkshire. With photographs of many of his favourite Yorkshire spots taken by well-known photographers, and text supplied by Gervase himself, it is both an affectionate photographic journey through the land he loves, and at the same time a journey from his own childhood into adulthood.

Gervase's gently humorous tales about life as a school inspector have been compared to James Herriot. But his Yorkshire is very different to Herriot's.

Yes, he loves the dales and moors, he concedes. But he also loves the other Yorkshire: the brooding, industrial Yorkshire of the south and west, with its factories and mills and great cities.

That's partly because he was brought up in South Yorkshire - and so his earliest, richest memories are of there.

He was born in a small, redbrick semi in Rotherham, the son of a steelworker in the Steel, Peach & Tozer foundry in what he describes as the "dark and dirty Don valley." Even today, when he visits the Magna museum, which recreates the region's great steel past, he feels a mixture of pain and pride.

"My father was a steel worker all his life, in a filthy, dirty, dangerous job," he says. "And I realised, when I looked at the arc furnace, that he went into a place like that day in, day out, for all those years. It wasn't happy that, seeing Magna."

His childhood was, however - joyously so, he says. And the places he loves best in Yorkshire are still the places he used to visit as a boy on his bike.

Best-loved of all is Conisbrough Castle near Doncaster, with its "mighty 90-foot tower and six immense buttresses."

"I was this little boy from a council house who read Arthur Ransome and Ivanhoe," he says. "I wasn't good at science or numbers but I had an imagination and I loved reading. Conisbrough was in the middle of a really industrial area, a pit village, but the castle soars into the sky. It was the setting for Ivanhoe, and I used to lie on the bank and imagine the knights coming out in their armour."

Equally rich in memories for Gervase is Roche Abbey, near the South Yorkshire town of Maltby. "We would cycle out to Wickersley, famous for the grindstones used in the Sheffield cutlery trade, through the mining town of Maltby and into the country, eventually arriving at the crumbling remains of the magnificent Cistercian abbey," he writes in the introduction to his book. "Only the east end of the church remained, but one could sense by the outline of the stones how huge and imposing the building must have been."

His parents were great day trippers - which was how Gervase first fell in love with the Yorkshire coast: "Staithes, where time seemed to have stopped; Sandsend and its great stretch of clean beach; Robin Hoods Bay, where we would explore the narrow entries and snicketts; and, of course, Whitby, with its quaint streets, picturesque quay and imposing abbey."

As a sixth-former he went on field trips to the North York Moors, and fell in love with "this silent and bleak world with its great tracts of heather and bracken." And then, when he came to Leeds to study to be a teacher, a whole new area of the county opened up to him.

Among his new discoveries was Kirkstall Abbey. "My girlfriend at the time was a flame-haired, green-eyed Irish girl, and many a romantic evening was spent at Kirkstall Abbey, walking hand-in-hand by the river," he writes.

But again, his memories of the abbey are bitter-sweet. "It was on one beautiful summer evening, as we sat amidst the ruins, that my flame-haired Irish beauty told me she had met someone else... and was ending our relationship."

He soon forgot her, however, when he met his future wife Christine, a "Yorkshire lass through and through" who hailed from West Yorkshire and who introduced him to the delights of Haworth, Rombald's Moor and East Riddlesden Moor.

Later memories, all of which have added to the Yorkshire which is uniquely his, include the bridge at Clapham Beck, in the shadow of Ingleborough Hill. "My eldest son Richard, aged three, pulled off his shoe, which dropped into the waters below and floated out of sight," he writes. "Maybe this was a clever ruse, for I had to carry him all the way back to West Borran Head near High Bentham, where we were staying."

There are memories aplenty, too, from his time as a school inspector. One of the photographs that finds pride of place in his book is a spectacular shot of Drax power station, near Selby - which he used to pass on his visits to Selby schools. The very name, he says, conjures up something rather sinister. "And yet it is meaningful for me."

York, with its "mighty Minster", has a chapter all to itself. One of his favourite buildings in the city, he writes - apart from the Minster itself - is "the medieval black-and-white timbered facade of St William's College, named after a relative of William the Conqueror."

In his introduction, Gervase writes that he "still feels that huge sense of awe for 'God's Own Country'".

It is a sense of awe that comes through loud and clear in this beautiful book - and that many Yorkshire folk will no doubt share.

Gervase Phinn's Yorkshire, A Pictorial Journey, is published by Dalesman, priced £14.99.

Updated: 16:17 Friday, October 31, 2003