Herriot thought the view from Sutton Bank – a sweeping panorama of the Vale of Mowbray and the distant Pennines – the finest in England. Who's arguing?
When you visit Herriot Country, you're on the doorstep of an area of countryside that James Herriot himself considered one of the most beautiful in Britain – the North York Moors National Park.
The west of the National Park, which was covered by Herriot's veterinary practice, is an area of rolling hills, green valleys, towering crags and wide expanses of moorland. People first settled here around 8,000 years ago, and the last three hundred generations of inhabitants have left the area with an extraordinarily rich heritage.
Villages
Some of the England's loveliest, least spoilt villages are nestled among the Hambleton Hills. The honey-coloured stone cottages of Coxwold and the bustling market place at Osmotherley look much as they have done for hundreds of years.
Furniture
This area is world-famous for its furniture workshops, which continue to make furniture using traditional techniques and the highest standards of craftsmanship.
Natural Heritage
From the windswept moors to the rolling farmland below, this area is teeming with wildlife. Deer haunt the woods that still clothe the steep hillsides. Lapwings, curlews and golden plovers swoop over the heather.
Look out for buzzards soaring on the thermals above the Hambleton escarpment.
Paths and Tracks
In former centuries this area lay on one of the main north–south trading routes, and the legacy of those days is an extensive network of drove roads, paths and tracks, dotted with old stone crosses, today trodden by walkers.
Literature
This quiet countryside has been home to not just one but three major authors. Lawrence Sterne, author of the 18th-century comic classic Tristram Shandy, lived in a delightfully eccentric cottage in Coxwold, near Thirsk. His home is now a museum. JL Carr, whose 1980 novel A Month in the Country is regarded as a modern masterpiece, was born at Carlton Minniot, just outside Thirsk. And then, of course, there's Alf Wight, better known as James Herriot.
