writer who created pern

WHEN Selina Scott returned to live in Yorkshire, she was eyed a little suspiciously by the locals as possibly yet another tiresome "comer-in" who would play at country living, and probably weekends only.

It wasn't long, though, before they saw – initially by the state of her hands, she says – that she was serious about rearing angora goats and tending and improving her 200 acres at Coxwold in the Hambleton Hills. She soon became involved in campaigning to preserve ancient woodland and signed up for the Countryside Stewardship scheme.

The former news reporter, Breakfast TV presenter and chat show star describes her neighbours in North Yorkshire as "lovely, old-fashioned, welcoming and good people, who are open about their lives". Their neighbourliness has certainly come to her rescue many times.

When her car brakes failed and she ended up in a ditch, the cavalry turned up to dig her out.

When her father died unexpectedly last Christmas, she says that without being asked her neighbours quietly moved in and looked after the farm. Her admiration for farmers is genuine.

"I take my hat off to them, old and young. They're so wise and hard-working and know how to survive all the problems that the weather and the land throw at them."

Scott was born in Scarborough and grew up near Guisborough, but later lived in Scotland before becoming a metropolitan media type and travelling the world for her work, which at one point included a talk show in the US. When she decided to become a farmer, in her early 50s and disillusioned with TV's growing fixation with youth and celebrity, she was fairly certain she was closing a door on that world for good.

Her return to the land was prompted by the adoption of a little herd of angora goats, which she billeted with a friend until she found the perfect property in North Yorkshire.

A couple of years into her new project, and thanks to a short but gratifying Channel 4 rant about the dumbing down of TV news, telly's treatment of women and the exploitativeness of reality shows, suddenly she was in demand again, with offers to appear in programmes that were, in her own words, "mostly rubbish and easy to refuse".

She and a scruffy rescue dog called Chump did win a dog training series The Underdog Show (don't get Selina going about animal welfare, or animals in general, for they are her greatest weakness), and she made reports for countryside programmes. The income certainly helped with the running costs up there in Coxwold, where the gorgeous angora goats were also starting to pay their way thanks to the production of mohair socks from their silky ringlets.

Six years after returning to the countryside, the socks from the 26 angoras are selling well, there's a new pond on the go at the farm, and Selina Scott seems highly content with her life in the country, although she admits the going can be tough.

She was the natural choice to front In Search of England's Green and Pleasant Land, a BBC documentary about the hardships of country life and the difficulty of making a living in the midst of a credit crunch. But while Selina and the crew were travelling about the county from interview to interview, gathering footage of breathtaking hills and dales as they went, the film turned into a very different creature.

Scott asks her interviewees about the adversities of life beyond the glow of street lamps, and in the case of retired police motorcycle officer Sue Woodcock, who lives in a farmhouse high above Grassington, the daily round includes fetching water from a well and scratching a living from the wool shorn off the backs of her elderly sheep. But while Sue – who writes a regular Dales Diary for the Yorkshire Post – talks about how cold it is, the camera is gazing over incomparable stretches of bleak but beautiful hills. As an observer you can't stop yourself calculating how much sacrifice you might be prepared to make for a view so bewitching.

Selina explores the Dales village of Buckden and nearby hamlet of Hubberholme, where the Falshaw family have been farming cattle for generations. At times the business has struggled and diversification had to be explored – in their case the conversion of one old building into a bunk barn and another into holiday cottages.

Gordon Falshaw describes how his family has kept the business going "with hard work in all weathers" and is delighted to report that the farm has just had its best year ever, thanks to the sterling/euro exchange rate. Lambs that sold for only £27 a year ago are fetching up to £65.

Scott visits the Michelin-starred pub and restaurant The Star at Harome, where chef Andrew Pern and his wife Jacquie employ 100 (some working at their other venture, The Pheasant) and pride themselves on using local suppliers of locally-grown food, giving work to locals and enjoying the support of the local community, whom Andrew describes as much less fickle than town and city-dwellers.

Back in Coxwold, Selina Scott's particular piece of heaven, she says life is changing and not necessarily for the better, with the loss of local facilities.

"We no longer have our village shop and Post Office, as the couple who ran it for 30 years retired and the house and business have been on the market for 18 months without a single offer. The high value of the property – £600,000 – would mean a mortgage that couldn't be serviced by income from a small village shop, and few people would take on the
seven-days-a-week commitment these days."

The honeypots of the Dales clog up with cars at the weekends, and tourism and National Park managers scratch their heads over how to promote this vital economic sector while keeping as much of the countryside as unspoilt as possible.

Trees are a particular bugbear for Selina Scott: "The lopping down of trees or branches for no apparent reason is something thing that gets me going. In my opinion the chainsaw is responsible for more damage than nuclear weapons. I have a little 800-year-old oak tree, and would never chop it because its branches were a bit untidy.

"The dying of Malton as a market town is a crying shame (she is a member of the Charles Dickens (Malton) Society, which promotes the writer's connections with the town, the setting for A Christmas Carol)... and it's appalling the way every little bit of available space in Kirkbymoorside has been built up. So much has been wrecked by modern housing.

"If you go to the Cotswolds, the character of the villages has been preserved so well that you could eat them. Up here, the North York Moors planners have only just got around to banning plastic windows. And when it comes to listing buildings, they don't patrol the inside of them properly, paying attention to all the period details that should be retained."

It seems that Selina Scott uses her fame to good cause, promoting her beloved Yorkshire and protesting loudly when she perceives it to be ill-treated. She does her best to look after her little corner of it and isn't afraid to air her views. Despite her apparent coolness and serenity she can be magnificently fierce.

Her other piece of heaven is a farmhouse she visits for holidays in the Serra de Tramuntana of Mallorca. Her decades-long and rather colourful relationship with the Balearic island is the subject of her soon-to-be-published first book, A Long Walk In The High Hills. Yet another venture that will help her to live her own rural idyll, between two very different kinds of heaven.