My pilgrimage to Yorkshire and why you should take the trip of your literary dreams

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I have always longed to go to Yorkshire.I was 10 when I first read “All Creatures Great and Small,” devouring each subsequent book that Alf Wight, under the pen name James Herriot, wrote about life as a veterinarian in his beloved Yorkshire Dales.I was a bit older when I encountered Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” which opens in the seaside town of Whitby, where cliffs overlook the sea in which the ill-fated ship Demeter meets its end.

In my teens, I discovered the wild moors and ancient halls of “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights.” More recently, I have been entranced by the work of Sally Wainwright, whose string of critically acclaimed series — ”Last Tango in Halifax,” “Happy Valley,” “Gentleman Jack” and “Riot Women” — have made her the modern bard of Yorkshire, England.So when a friend, planning a visit to her daughter at Durham University, proposed I join her for a side trip of our own, I jumped at the chance to travel to a land I knew only through the eyes of others.In mid-April, I joined my friend Nancy in York, a city often mentioned in Yorkshire-based literature.On a sunny Saturday, we took a train to Thirsk, where Herriot, alongside Donald and Brian Sinclair (known in the books as Siegfried and Tristan Farnon) lived and worked in “Skeldale House,” now the World of James Herriot museum.The city sprawl quickly gave way to stone-walled fields full of dazzling yellow rape and spring-green grass dotted with sheep and frolicking lambs.

April is lambing season, the perfect time to visit Herriot Country.“All young animals are appealing,” he wrote, “but the lamb has been given an unfair share of charm.”Situated between the North York Moors and Yorkshire Dales national parks, Thirsk (known as Darrowby in the Herriot books) is a market town, organized around a great open plaza in which stands a clock tower that on this day was decorate...