AN early Easter looms, bringing with it the start of a new tourist season, and several organisations involved in the industry in Yorkshire are forecasting a bumper year.

Trouble is, there are many different types of tourism involved in the county of Broad Acres and many different types of tourist, from visiting foreigners to day-trippers from the big towns and cities.

There are the hotspots for the history buffs, like York itself and our many ancient castles and ruined abbeys; there are mega theme parks, some of them fairly new like The Deep in Hull to lure first-time visitors; and, of course, there is the east coast for paddling on the beach or a having a go on the dodgems.

Here in the Dales, making a living from tourism is a much harder job surrounded by many stringent regulations. The roads are not good. Planning restrictions are very tight. And for an area which has always attracted a more diffident type of visitor, the plethora of low cost airlines offering cheap flights to exotic places like Prague, Lisbon or Budapest are a completely new form of competition.

Make no mistake, running a tourist venue in the glorious surroundings of the Dales - a dream for many a desk-bound worker in the city rat race - is by no means a bed of roses.

In fact, it can be a bed of many thorns. So to find out how you succeed in this tough business environment, I went to see two of our most successful proponents, Anthony and Vanessa Roberts, owners of the Kilnsey Trout Farm, the sort of "green" visitor attraction much favoured by the Yorkshire Dales National Park.

It has been with us a long time now - the first glimmerings came back in 1978 - and in that time it has grown to be much more than a production centre for rainbow trout. But it was also an important pioneer, making many a farmer and landowner in the Dales realise that to survive as a healthy business, diversification for straight farming was the way of the future.

"Back then, farming was not going through the sort of crises which seem to hit it every couple of years these days," said Anthony, 66, and a countryman through and through. "But my brother, Peter, and I thought that the time would soon be with us when country estates like this would need more income than straight forward farming could generate. So I suppose we became a sort of pioneer - and weren't we proved right."

The Kilnsey Estate, with its 1,000 acre home farm, a clutch of tenanted farms running along the Upper Wharfe valley, and the Tennant's Arms pub in the spectacular shadow of Kilnsey Crag, had been in the family for four generations, bought by textile tycoon Sir James Roberts, a man so successful that he was able to buy out the famous Sir Titus Salt from his mill at Saltaire.

The pub had been leased out to a brewery but when the lease expired in the mid-1970s, the brothers decided to take it back into family management. It was the start of years of expansion in countryside-based business which set a pattern which many have since tried to emulate.

Peter, a land agent, was one of the organisers of a large estate of self-catering apartments and villas in Langdale, at the very heart of the Lake District, developed with the notoriously strict planning laws of that national park.

Anthony, still working the home farm, looked round for ways of increasing its business potential, hit upon one of its great assets, a rushing spring of crystal clear water bursting out the hillside as Sykes Beck. Would water this pure be a good breeding medium for rainbow trout for the table?

That's where it began. The small shop selling trout expanded into a bigger shop selling other gourmet foods, then a restaurant, all supervised by Vanessa, who came from a landed family in the Scottish borders - she was the sister of Anthony's best friend at Oxford.

Both understood the vagaries of running a country estate. But both have a deep love of the landscape and knew they could never do anything which clashed with the beauty of the dale. So although it has been expanding slowly ever since, all development has been carried out to environmentally friendly principles.

It now has trout fishing lakes, for both adults and children, a large restaurant, nature trails, a garden brimming with plants specially chosen to attract butterflies in high summer, and a conservation unit for red squirrels threatened with extinction - some escaped last autumn and have now become village pets in nearby Coniston.

There are also craft classes for children on Sundays: "We like to be family friendly and this allowed bored dads to sit and read the Sunday papers whilst the kids paint and draw," says Anthony. This all sounds nice and cosy but, make no mistake, it's hard work.

"I couldn't have done it without Vanessa. I can still go back and run the farm, leaving her to sort out all the daft ideas that I've dreamed up."

Vanessa, in fact, tends to work seven days a week all year round - the farm only closes on Christmas Day - so I asked her what was needed to run a successful Dales tourist attraction visited by between 40,000 and 60,000 people every year.

"Total dedication," she said with a somewhat wan smile: she had come in on the day of my visit despite being in intense pain from a suspected slipped disc. "That and total involvement, however many hours a day it might take."

As the foot and mouth debacle proved, tourism is of vital importance to Craven, even if sometimes the crows get on our nerves.

If the pundits are right, and Easter sees the start of a boom year for visitors, people like Anthony and Vanessa Roberts are playing their part.