Geoff Sargieson first visited the Yorkshire Dales when his father, who was a keen angler, tested his skill against the brown trout of Wensleydale.

He recalls venturing into Dales pubs, "perhaps a touch under age", and hearing for the first time the Song of Swaledale, which begins: "Land of the Swale, beautiful dale..."

Very late one night, he heard a group of farmers and others, standing round the bar at the Cover Bridge Inn, burst into song. It was a rendering of Swaledale's own special anthem.

"I was amazed how well they sang it. That tune stayed with me." Now, almost 40 years later, Geoff is an authority on the music of the Yorkshire Dales.

Much of what he has discovered has been "on air" for he is also a most experienced broadcaster. A few years ago, at the time of the Swaledale Festival, he was producing an arts programme for Radio Two which would also be heard by listeners to Radio York, a station he was running at the time.

The studio was the back room of a pub at Reeth. "We had to fiddle around with the transmitters. Listeners in Reeth could hear Radio Cleveland but not Radio York, which was audible on the other side of the valley. Reeth could not get Radio Two at all!"

Geoff naturally wanted to broadcast, from the heart of Swaledale, its famous local song. The Dales choirs he contacted did not know it but one choir cheerfully undertook to "get something together" for the broadcast. "They knew of it but had never sung it."

They got the words from one person and the tune from another source, putting them together into an acceptable piece. "We opened the programme with them standing in the pub yard, by the empty barrels, singing the Swaledale song."

He came across the Song of Wensleydale a few years ago when he heard, through folk music circles, that Freda White sang to her own guitar accompaniment in Dales folk clubs. When Geoff sought her out, she sang the special Wensleydale song.

It turned out that Kit Calvert, of Hawes, had given Freda the words of an old poem written in the Wensleydale dialect. She thought up a tune to go with it. As she put it, she "nudged the words around to fit the tune". In due course, meeting Kit again, she sang it to him. He was thrilled to hear familiar words set to music.

Mike Harding, who is prominently associated with folk music as broadcast by Radio Two, has a house in Dentdale where, last year, Geoff arranged for a few of his friends to gather and yarn before microphones for a special tape concerned with Yorkshire Christmases.

I was one of them, enjoying not only the experience but the company - Stanley Ellis and Georgina Boyes, who are dialect experts, and Juliet Barker, writer, historian and an expert on the Bronte family.

There was music from all parts of Yorkshire, including Will Noble from West Yorkshire and, from the Dales, the Leyburn Ladies Choir and Hawes Silver Prize Band.

The indomitable Miss Douglas, of Giggleswick, set a standard for recording Dales tunes when she toured the Craven district with folk dancers in the 1930s and persuaded old folk to demonstrate the steps of dances they performed when young and also the tunes that went with those dances.

These were published in two slim books that are greatly prized by those who have personal memories of Miss Douglas and her campaign. When she moved to The Traddock at Austwick she had one room allocated as a ballroom and kept an eagle eye on the dancers. They must do everything by the book.

The most famous piece of music associated with the Dales is orchestral. The composer, Arthur Wood, had associations with Harrogate, his family having moved there from Heckmondwike in 1882.

He wrote a suite called "My Native Heath". The four movements were entitled Barwick Green, Knaresborough, Ilkley Tarn and Bolton Abbey. The first of them has long been renowned as the signature tune of the radio programme "The Archers".

Arthur Wood, growing up in musical Harrogate, became organist of the Presbyterian Church at £10 a year and then got a job as a paid flautist and accompanist with the Spa orchestra. He became deputy conductor at the age of 20. He was fond of recalling when he played in the Valley Gardens, though "there were cold Easter mornings when the poor chaps in the band, in top hats, blew their clarinet cornets with running noses."

He never forgot his northern upbringing. His wit was based on good Yorkshire sense. His daughter, Lyn, remembered coming home from a party, very proud that she had her first taste of caviare. Said father: "Acquire the taste for caviare by all means, provided you don't lose your taste for kippers."

On the day before he died, he insisted - with north country stubbornness - on bringing in the coals.

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