THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

If you were to follow the line of my journeyings you would see it like the track-chart of a four-masted barque during a spell of gales and wild weather.  Following it on foot, you would find youself in difficult places, walking on mountain-tops and open moors with dead darkness around you, or the uncanny livingness of moving mist.  You would wade up to the knees in peaty water, up to the thighs in soaked ling, and up to the neck in bracken.  You would fight your way up crags and struggle down steep-sided gills choked with rocks and rotten timber.  You would proceed across country without landmarks and often you would be very lost.

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A great acreage of the North Riding is not tamed country, and to know its wildness you yourself have to be a rather wild person – wild enough and tough enough to match and master this wild, tough country.

Harland/North Riding, 1951