Dalesfolk: Ethne Bannister

The phone went down and I found myself grinning.

Ethne Bannister, as well as being lynchpin of one of Craven's most distinguished families, has a wonderfully understated sense of humour which puts you at ease even before you meet.

But, as I was to find out later, she actually does seem to believe that she has played a very small role in the transformation of an old country estate to bring it bursting into the 21st century at full throttle when so many like it have perished, broken up and sold, a piece of English history gone forever.

However, the Bannister family - of which Ethne is the doyenne - came in as rescuers in the very beginning.

They bought the 1,800-acre estate in 1969 from the Tottie family which had produced nine children who had, remarkably, all remained childless.

And the Bannisters' first decision was a heartbreaking one: the old hall, an early Victorian pile with a frontage almost 100 yards long, had to be completely demolished.

It was riddled with dry rot and, at some point, might have fallen down of its own accord.

For Ethne, then the mother of four young children, it was a terrible choice - being cruel to be kind - because as a girl born and bred in Gargrave just down the road, the hall had been part of her own childhood. She had played in the grounds and had skated on the magnificent ornamental lake in those harsh winters we rarely seem to have these days.

But her husband, Michael, was used to tough decisions. His family had for generations been in the textile industry, first in wool and then cotton, and had built up a major business in East Lancashire.

But by the late 1960s, the writing was on the wall for British textile manufacturing so a decision was made to move into the retail side of the industry - one result of which is the flourishing Boundary Mill store in Colne.

That business acumen was also put into play at Coniston Cold. Although the old hall was demolished, all its wonderful old stone, laboriously transported by horse and cart from Halifax in the 1840s, was carefully stored. It might come in useful one day.

It took several years to demolish the old pile and for the family to decide what to do next. The first action was to build a brand new house, much smaller but much more elegant, overlooking the lake.

They used the old stone, of course, so that the house which thousands of trippers have peered down upon with envy from the A65 is in fact just 30 years or so old - but that is difficult to tell, even from the inside.

House built, Ethne, the local girl from just down the road whose mother had been the daughter of a Scottish doctor, brought up her four children in the "big house" but never forgot her local roots: one of my informants told me that "she hasn't changed one little bit from the little girl we used to play with".

Sadly, the family was not without tragedy. Their oldest child, Louise, grew up, got married, had four children, and then died desperately young from cancer.

A close cousin, politician Iain Macleod - an old boy of Ermysted's Grammar School, Skipton - became a Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer and was tipped as a future Prime Minister but he, too, died young with coronary disease.

But there was cause for celebration too. Another cousin, Dr Roger Bannister, became the world's first four-minute miler - and remains a regular visitor. As the three Bannister sons grew up, each went their different ways.

Nicholas became a banker, went to New York - and had moved his offices from the Twin Towers area just before the September 11 massacre. Richard took over the highly successful Boundary Mill operation. And the youngest, Tom, went to the Royal Agricultural College - and came home with an eye for change.

Says Ethne: "Quite soon after we moved here, we realised that the estate needed to generate more income: to maintain things as we wished, we could no longer rely just on farming.

"Tom came back from college bursting with new ideas and the first thing he did was to convert an old silk mill we owned on the River Aire into a fish farm to produce rainbow trout for the wholesale market.

"Then we decided to sell some of the fish, both fresh and smoked, on the estate, so we built a little shop - using stone from the old hall, of course. That then grew into a gift shop where I served behind the counter.

"Then visitors would ask if they could get a cup of tea or coffee so we built a caf - out of the stone, of course. That grew into a restaurant and now, of course, we have the 40-room hotel. You have to move with the times, you know, or fail."

Tom Bannister manages the hotel complex, where Ethne claims to be "just the washer up."

But she also helps organise conferences - and even allows guest to use rooms in the "private" house to discuss their business as they gaze out over the lake.

The day before, Ethne had spent hours cleaning up litter from the lawn after an outdoor function and after I left, she said, she would have to get down to making arrangements for some of the long list of weddings which are scheduled this summer.

Because of this, Ethne and Michael Bannister spend much of their private time together in their kitchen. In the meantime, they have provided something like 100 jobs on the estate, a massive number in such a rural area.

"That's about the same as the estate would have employed on the farms in Victorian times," says Ethne. "Estates like this have always had a duty to provide work for local people. It is a duty we are proud to carry on. But you can only do so by moving with the times..."

Nice philosophy, that, for a mere washer-up!