Tyke that on Yorkie Dale trail Ted Bruning - published in Whats Brewing, January 1997
To those who rarely if ever visit Yorkshire, the county has a split personality. There's kagoule-wearing rural North Yorkshire, all Emmerdale Farm and misleading Theakston ads. And there's the flat-cap-and-whippet, trouble-at-t'mill towns and cities of South and West Yorkshire, all soot and rugby league. The former is firmly on the tourist trail: the Bronte Parsonage, Fountains Abbey, the Pennine Way and countless climbable crags lure trippers of all types. But who, other than a masochistic industrial archaeology nut with a fondness for back-to-back housing, would ever want to visit Hunslet, or Halifax, or Bradford? Well, Yorkshire's industrial centres aren't quite the grime blackened tripe-guzzling hells of Southern imagination. Leeds in particular has undergone an amazing transformation in the past decade or so. But even ignoring the attractions that places like Halifax and Huddersfield can offer in their own right, they are also remarkably close to the moors and dales which are the real tourist honeypots. You can leave Bradford city centre and be out on the hills, walking the tracks frequented by Foggy, Compo and Clegg, in 45 minutes flat. Which all goes to make the motion of the Bradford Real Ale Holiday, now- in its 20th year, rather less oxymoronic than it at first appears. The blunt truth about Bradford is that IMAX giant cinema screen and some of the best curries outside the subcontinent notwithstanding, it's not the sort of place many folk would choose for their August fortnight. But for the lover of real ale and good pubs, a long weekend in Bradford in July makes a lot of sense. There's plenty of good ale to be had in the city itself: the 1997 Good Beer Guide lists 14 pubs and a students' bar, with a mouth-watering menu of beers from the region's top independents - Tim Taylor Black Sheep, Moorhouse, Old Mill as well the inevitable Theakston and Tetley. But Bradford's main attraction is its location on the very edge of the huge West Riding conurbation, surrounded on three sides by picturesque towns and villages, breathtaking moorland scenery, and some of the country's finest micro-breweries and real ale pubs. The first Real Ale Holiday was organised by Jerry Garside, now retired from active membership in 1977, and with two gaps there has been one every year since then attracts anything from six to 15 customers each year. What the organisers try to pack in to the five-night holiday is variety. It's not just a question of dragging the participants round as many pubs as possible while keeping them well-soused: the Bradfordians are justly proud of what their region has to offer and they want to share as much of it as they can with their visitors. "We do always try to fit in one brewery visit last year it was Riverhead at Marsden, and the year before it was Worth Brewery at Keighley," says Josie "Pubs and ale are at the centre of the holiday but there have to be other things as well - you can't be drinking all the time. We hire a minibus for three of the four days, and on one of them we'll have a scenic day when we go out into the country. We try to include one trip out to the coast we've taken our visitors to Scarborough, Whitby, Bridlington, Robin's Hood Ray and even Hull". "We work out an itinerary for each day, but it's flexible enough to be changed if that's what people want. There's usually a walk every day and one of the days is public transport day. when everyone gets a rover ticket and we help them plan their own route". A day in town is usually on the itinerary as well - although the town could be anything from Leeds with its newly-opened Harvey Nicholls, Haworth with its troops of polyglot Bronte-worshippers, or the pleasant and heavily pubbed market town of Otley. Otley is a particularly good town for the visiting Southerner. True micro-brewers and even independent brewers are not well represented in a town dominated by the Tetley - Theakston duopoly. But some of the pubs, notably the Bay Horse, are true gems, and there are so many pubs that they have to work hard for a living. For example, a ham sandwich in the Whitbread-owned Rose & Crown turns out not to be the water-filled, half-slice of industrial ham in thin-cut Mother's Pride you would expect for £1.90, but a mountain of butcher's ham, in a freshly baked roll with a selection of salads that fill the plate. The beer, too, is exceptional: a full pint of Fuggles Imperial IPA, served in sample-room condition and at a price that permits one to contemplate the prospect of a second. As for rural pubs, the country round Bradford is sprinkled with such a wealth of them that a true aficionado could spend half a lifetime sampling them, let alone a long weekend. One regular on the Bradford Real Ale Holiday route is the Royal Oak at Dacre Banks near Harrogate. It's above average even for the area. It's no village beerhouse like that other perfect Yorkshire pub, the Birch Hall Inn at Beckholes near Whitby. A superior style of pub altogether, the Royal Oak is an early 18th century manor house, built in the classical style of pale local stone, with a panelled and carpeted interior broken up into pleasantly spacious rooms, and a magnificent dining room. It's still very much a pub, though, with a friendly barmaid from South London and a pint of Black Sheep which you might well choose if you were only to be allowed one more pint of ale in your whole life. Bradford CAMRA has quite possibly forgotten why it decided to hold its annual holiday in the first place, but it's not a fundraiser for the branch. The price has just gone up to £195 full-board after four years at £175, and one year when they found they'd accidentally made a profit they sent everyone a £20 refund. One reason that it keeps going is that the people keep coming. Many of them are regulars for whom it's the perfect way of seeing and tasting the delights of Yorkshire, and their hosts - who try to accompany all the excursions if they can are always glad to have them. Perhaps it's something other branches could adopt, especially in counties like Devon Norfolk, and Cumbria which also have a mix of brilliant breweries and pubs, beautiful scenery and coast, and underrated towns and cities. "We don't run it to raise funds, and in fact one of our preoccupations is keeping the price down", says Josie Boothroyd. "The vast bulk of the cost is the accommodation. Sadly Bradford isn't as well-endowed with cheap accommodation as say, a holiday town off-season would be. We have actually changed hotels when our usual one put its prices up. "But it could be run to make a modest profit without being too expensive and as long as people don't expect professional organisation." So how difficult is the organisation? "Well," says Josie, "I organised Bradford Beer Festival for 10 years and by the time I finished it was pretty much a doddle. Organising the holiday, with the people we have to help, isn't even as difficult as that".