Helen Pickles

All Creatures Great and Small: how to explore the Yorkshire Dales

  • From Spectator Life
All Creatures Great and Small (Playground Television UK, Channel 5)

James Herriot’s story about a country vet, with scene-stealing backdrops and a coterie of country characters first instilled the Yorkshire Dales into the popular imagination back in 1972. The beauty of Yorkshire wasn’t lost on Herriot, whose real name was Alf Wright: ‘At times it seemed unfair that I should be paid for my work,’ he writes in All Creatures Great and Small, ‘for driving out in the early morning with the fields glittering under the first pale sunshine and the wisps of mist still hanging on the high tops.’

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And it seems millions of others are now discovering the joys of this landscape too. The revised TV adaptation of this book, about the trials and tribulations of a country veterinary practice in the middle of the 20th century (first televised in the 1970s and currently showing on Channel 5) has coincided with a marked increase in visitor numbers, including the number of young people discovering the Dales.  

The new series was largely filmed in and around Wharfedale in the southern Yorkshire Dales, with Grassington as the fictional Darrowby. In reality, Herriot was based in Thirsk which is not technically in the Dales (it’s on the edge of the North York Moors) where his original veterinary practice (which he re-imagined as Skeldale House in his books) is now The World of James Herriot Museum.

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The Yorkshire village of Grassington plays the role of fictional town Darrowby

But Grassington, with its narrow lanes, cobbled village square, period houses and individual shops, easily transforms into 1930s England. Local pub The Devonshire, for example, provided exterior shots for the fictional Drovers Arms, independent bookshop The Stripey Badger became greengrocer’s GF Endleby, Walkers Bakery became Darrowby Cycle Stores, and one of the village’s larger private homes became Skeldale House, home to veterinary surgeon Siegfried Farnon (Samuel West) who hires the newly qualified James Herriot (Nicholas Ralph) as his assistant.

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