All Creatures star Nicholas Ralph has fallen in love with the beauty spots and traditional pubs in the Dales...
Nick Redman - 10 September 2024
James Herriot (pen name of author/vet Alf Wight) was a Glaswegian who moved to the Yorkshire Dales and fell in love with the area. So it’s only fitting that Nicholas Ralph, another Scot, should have fallen in love just as intensely when playing Herriot in All Creatures Great and Small. Here he describes six of his favourite places in the Dales…
1 STUNNING ARNCLIFFEIt’s a village with beautiful houses all around a huge green that we use for various locations, including the back of Skeldale House. It looks like time has stopped. The Falcon Inn was the original Woolpack in Emmerdale Farm way back in the 1970s. It’s an old-style local. They go out the back with jugs to fill up the beer from casks, and the toilets are still outside. It featured in the scene when Wesley Binks egged my car, which isn’t representative of the locals. A group of ladies sit on the green at five o’clock having gin and tonic in the sun, and always invite us over.
2 EAT OUT IN HARROGATE There’s a lovely little seafood restaurant called the Drum and Monkey, which has about 20 seats downstairs. It feels like you’re in the living room of a house, and the food is absolutely brilliant. We all like going there. The Tannin Level has a lovely seasonal menu [local fish, roasts], and the maître d’ knows us all quite well. He’s a wonderful host. Then there’s the dog-friendly Little Ale House. We find ourselves in there on occasion – me and Callum Woodhouse, who plays Tristan. There’s about eight tables, the guys remember you, and they actually had an Irn-Bru sour beer once. It looked like Irn-Bru and it tasted, well, like Irn Bru. It was great.
3 SKIPTON LIKES TO PARTY Skipton is the last market town before the Dales so it’s full of bars and restaurants. There’s a popular pub called the Woolly Sheep Inn [cask ales, en-suite bedrooms]. Afterwards you go to the Fleece for a karaoke disco and on to the club Kooky, which is open till 5am. As it’s the one club in town, everybody ends up in there and it’s rammed. It’s a good crack, but we’ve never made it to 5am.
4 BE NICE TO THE LOCALS IN GRASSINGTON Everyone is always welcoming when we’re filming. There’s one lady in the village, which we use for Darrowby, and I take my hat off to her. When we’re filming, if she’s walking her dog and we’re in the way, she just keeps on walking through the scene. We dress the village, which miffs the bakery, because they’re done up like a bike repair shop and next door we put a bakery. They’re like, “Why did you make us a bike shop?” The Devonshire pub is our Drovers. The rooms upstairs are now called the James Herriot suite, the Helen Herriot suite and so on. People from America, Canada, Holland come to watch filming and stay there. If it’s a nice day there can be rows of visitors eight or ten deep watching us film. Some of the crew work on Doctor Who and say we get more people watching us.
5 WILD SWIMMING IS GREAT FOR THE HARDY Janet’s Foss is a waterfall in the woods along the footpath from Malham village. In the first series I had a skinny-dipping scene there. It was a freezing cold October and I had to put the “sock” on – it’s a genital guard, but everyone calls it a sock. It was drooping down below my knees so they taped it to my leg, which was mortifying. I looked like a Ken doll. A medic was checking my temperature as we were filming for hours and I was on the verge of hypothermia… then they used just 20 seconds of it. But the National Park is a treasure to visit.
6 THE DALESThis year James is back in the RAF, which we film in Lincolnshire, a lovely place but very flat. When we drove back into the Yorkshire Dales, and it just hit me again. Wow, this is why we film here! It is stunning. The rolling expanses, the dry stone walls, these little villages – you understand why James Herriot fell in love with the place. There’s a village called Litton, and in episode four there’s a storyline set there on a farm enclosed by the hills. You look around 360 degrees, and you could shoot any which way. I was standing with Stewart [Svaasand], our director, who’s also a Scot. He breathed, “This is magic, Nick. It really is.” We allow a moment sometimes to take it in between filming and appreciate what we’ve got.
1 STUNNING ARNCLIFFE It’s a village with beautiful houses all around a huge green that we use for various locations, including the back of Skeldale House. It looks like time has stopped. The Falcon Inn was the original Woolpack in Emmerdale Farm way back in the 1970s. It’s an old-style local. They go out the back with jugs to fill up the beer from casks, and the toilets are still outside. It featured in the scene when Wesley Binks egged my car, which isn’t representative of the locals. A group of ladies sit on the green at five o’clock having gin and tonic in the sun, and always invite us over.
2 EAT OUT IN HARROGATE There’s a lovely little seafood restaurant called the Drum and Monkey, which has about 20 seats downstairs. It feels like you’re in the living room of a house, and the food is absolutely brilliant. We all like going there. The Tannin Level has a lovely seasonal menu [local fish, roasts], and the maître d’ knows us all quite well. He’s a wonderful host. Then there’s the dog-friendly Little Ale House. We find ourselves in there on occasion – me and Callum Woodhouse, who plays Tristan. There’s about eight tables, the guys remember you, and they actually had an Irn-Bru sour beer once. It looked like Irn-Bru and it tasted, well, like Irn Bru. It was great.
3 SKIPTON LIKES TO PARTY Skipton is the last market town before the Dales so it’s full of bars and restaurants. There’s a popular pub called the Woolly Sheep Inn [cask ales, en-suite bedrooms]. Afterwards you go to the Fleece for a karaoke disco and on to the club Kooky, which is open till 5am. As it’s the one club in town, everybody ends up in there and it’s rammed. It’s a good crack, but we’ve never made it to 5am.
4 BE NICE TO THE LOCALS IN GRASSINGTON Everyone is always welcoming when we’re filming. There’s one lady in the village, which we use for Darrowby, and I take my hat off to her. When we’re filming, if she’s walking her dog and we’re in the way, she just keeps on walking through the scene. We dress the village, which miffs the bakery, because they’re done up like a bike repair shop and next door we put a bakery. They’re like, “Why did you make us a bike shop?” The Devonshire pub is our Drovers. The rooms upstairs are now called the James Herriot suite, the Helen Herriot suite and so on. People from America, Canada, Holland come to watch filming and stay there. If it’s a nice day there can be rows of visitors eight or ten deep watching us film. Some of the crew work on Doctor Who and say we get more people watching us.
5 WILD SWIMMING IS GREAT FOR THE HARDY Janet’s Foss is a waterfall in the woods along the footpath from Malham village. In the first series I had a skinny-dipping scene there. It was a freezing cold October and I had to put the “sock” on – it’s a genital guard, but everyone calls it a sock. It was drooping down below my knees so they taped it to my leg, which was mortifying. I looked like a Ken doll. A medic was checking my temperature as we were filming for hours and I was on the verge of hypothermia… then they used just 20 seconds of it. But the National Park is a treasure to visit.
6 THE DALES This year James is back in the RAF, which we film in Lincolnshire, a lovely place but very flat. When we drove back into the Yorkshire Dales, and it just hit me again. Wow, this is why we film here! It is stunning. The rolling expanses, the dry stone walls, these little villages – you understand why James Herriot fell in love with the place. There’s a village called Litton, and in episode four there’s a storyline set there on a farm enclosed by the hills. You look around 360 degrees, and you could shoot any which way. I was standing with Stewart [Svaasand], our director, who’s also a Scot. He breathed, “This is magic, Nick. It really is.” We allow a moment sometimes to take it in between filming and appreciate what we’ve got.