Having just walked the Cleveland Way - 100 miles of tracks along the Hambleton Escarpment and across the moors to the cliffs of the North East coast - I have been reflecting on the astonishing variety of landscapes to be found in Yorkshire.

The walk began at Helmsley and soon, from the top of Sutton Bank, I was looking over the Vale of York towards a blue-grey smudge on the western horizon which was the edge of the Pennine dale-country.

I was in Herriot Country. From the escarpment I could pick out the village of Thirlby, where Alf Wight, alias James Herriot, lived and from which he travelled to work as a vet based on Thirsk.

His son, James, records in the biography of his celebrated father that he regarded the view from Sutton Bank as "the finest in England".

He would stop for a few minutes in rapt admiration and then, a mile or two further east, scan 30 or 40 miles of unbroken moorland towards the Yorkshire coast.

This was the terrain in which I spent a week and where a young adder crossed my path, its body distended where it had gobbled down a small mammal. One of the most chilling notices on the Cleveland Way was "Adders on Banks". I was not reassured by a naturalist friend who said that normally there would be no confrontation. An adder, picking up the vibrations caused by my feet, would slither away.

I was thinking of Herriot last spring time, when I had a ten-mile walk from West Burton and eventually stood at the head of Witton Bank, a steep road with a zig-zag formation not unlike the pattern on the back of an adder.

Having been to the summit of Pen Hill, I descended to the moorland road twixt West Witton and Middleham and turned left. Into mind came the incident from the Herriot books when the young vet descended the bank in some terror. The brakes on his car had failed.

In real life, he and his wife Joan often stayed at a cottage at West Scrafton, in Coverdale, which was not far from the route I was following. A farmer who presumed he was having a holiday, when it was merely a break in a busy routine, was amazed to find the vet walking out with his dogs in driving rain and asked: "Why der yer come 'ere?"

I had walked across Walden, which is a cul de sac from a motoring point of view. Walden has more than its fair share of bad weather. One end is open to a north-easter and the other end admits the moist prevailing wind, which comes from the south-west.

Lying east of the main watershed, Walden is a trifle drier than Wharfedale, to which it is directly connected only by a moorland track, which begins at Starbotton and ends at Walden Head near a farm called Kentucky. A J Brown wrote about a horseshoe of soggy ground at the head of the dale as being "a very boggy stretch of evil quagmire and peaty moor".

In the name Walden, the suffix "den" denotes a dale. The little valley has always appealed to me because it is tucked away in an area of gentle contours. The fells do not look high, though some of them extend to over 1,700 ft. There are high crags, but wind and rain and frost have removed the sharp edges. They blend with the ridges.

Walden's history is obscure. It is said to have been a game reserve in the reign of Richard II and, as recently as 1850, was still (so "they" say) the haunt of red deer, wild cat and pine marten. It's a farming valley, with a scattering of country cottages. As far as local people are concerned, "there's usually nothing else to do up here except work."

I stopped by the preserved chimney associated with the Braithwaite Lead Smelt Mill, last used in the 1870s, and found a wide, walled track extending upwards, beside Thumpton Gill.

I was in Injun Country, judging by the columns of grey smoke rising from several places on the moors. In fact, the gamekeepers were swizzening, or burning, rank heather to encourage fresh shoots, food for grouse and sheep. I heard the calls of moor birds - grouse, curlew and the sad whistle of the golden plover, which is now a rarity in an area where once it was relatively common.

Having reached the head of Witton Bank, I thought of a local custom - the Burning of Bartle, which occurs on the eve of St Bartholomew's Day, towards the end of August, and involves the bearing of an effigy of Bartle through the village to Grassgill Lane, where it is incinerated.

Who was Bartle? No one seems to know. A particularly fanciful idea is that he was a vagabond living on Pen Hill who descended periodically to steal swine belonging to the villagers.

Another tale is that the custom is linked with a giant who was buried in a grave on the West Witton side of Pen Hill, the grave being large enough to hold ten normal men.

I followed the High Lane back to West Burton. It was a pleasant track, flanked by thorn trees. Towards Burton, where it passed a tract of woodland, I saw a nuthatch, a small bird that climbs or descends on the bark of a tree with equal ease.

The waterfall at West Burton was in thunderous state. The guardian of the extensive green was a dog with a large stick in its mouth, ready to drop at the feet of anyone who showed interest.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.