The farming couple who spread a little happiness (From Craven Herald)

The farming couple who spread a little happiness

2:41pm Saturday 21st June 2008 in Dales Folk By John Sheard

Scientists come up with some strange conclusions and I tend to ignore most of them, particularly when it comes to health matters. I mean, when so-called "experts" say one thing one week and the opposite the next, the best guide seems to be old-fashioned common sense.

However, I read one report which set me a'thinking. Scientists at Essex University had proved, they claimed, that one of the best ways for over-stressed townies to calm down a little was to visit a farm.

Getting into the countryside and having contact with farm animals "helped people shake off feelings of anger, confusion and depression," said the boffins. A massive 97 per cent of farm visitors felt less tired and more than nine out of 10 felt less tense.

Now this interested me, for those symptoms of anger, confusion and depression fitted almost exactly the state of mind of most of the farmers I have known these past 10 years, struggling against the policies of an uncaring and ignorant Government, recurring animal plagues, falling incomes and rising prices.

So I set out to see why a trip down on the farm could do so much for the visitors and yet extract such a toll from the owners.

And I found a hard-working farming couple who were, yes, tired and, yes, sometimes stressed. But they were also proud, successful and - the magic word - happy. John and Sandra Harrison have transformed Thornton Hall Country Park at Thornton-in-Craven from a struggling dairy farm into a show-piece leisure and educational attraction of the very type that the Essex University eggheads were eulogising - although the "leisure" bit applies to the lucky visitors rather than the Harrison family.

The day I saw them, they had just said goodbye to three school parties - 100 children from urban schools - who had played with the puppies, collected some of the eggs from the hen coops, watched the goats being milked and gone for rides on a 4x4 safari through herds of traditional breed cattle and a flock of 400 sheep.

That was the morning's work for John and Sandra. Now the "proper" work had to be started, like feeding hundreds of spring lambs, because Thornton Hall is a working farm as well as a visitor attraction.

Running it is very, very hard work, but as a business it is positively booming. "We need more staff," sighed Sandra, 43. "We just can't cope with the rush."

That is a very nice situation for any business couple. But it came out of tragedy and the hurt can still be detected in Sandra's eyes despite her bubbly charm and easy laughter. And things had begun to go wrong even before their prize milking cattle had to be culled during the foot and mouth debacle.

Sandra's father and grandfather had worked these 260 rolling acres on the fringes of Thornton long before the village began to expand. When the farm needed more outbuildings, planning permission was refused as they were too close to the new houses, a sort of back-to-front situation which still irks.

Her father, John Dawson, had plans to move the farm buildings and start over again when foot and mouth struck. Worse still, Mr Dawson was struck down with cancer and was to die a few years later. As work finally started, it was discovered the site stood on solid rock, which meant huge expense in putting in the foundations. Then the bottom dropped out of the dairy market!

It was time for a long talk, recalls Sandra now. She sat down with husband John, a one-time shepherd from Horton-in-Ribblesdale, and they tossed around a few ideas. Diversification was an absolute must - but into what?

"I'm not quite sure how the idea of turning the place into a visitor attraction came up," says Sandra now. "It sort of just evolved. We were obviously very worried about it all going wrong - it cost a lot of investment to bring it up to standard, particularly when it came to health and safety regulations.

"We opened three years ago and it started very slowly. But we put a mail shot round a lot of schools across Yorkshire and Lancashire down as far as North Manchester and now we can barely cope. Our son and daughter are in the business and we have six part-timers, but we are still exhausted at the end of every day."

At this point, husband John came back from feeding the lambs and I asked him how they could cope with running both a tourist attraction and a working farm.

He grinned: "When you've been a shepherd in North Ribblesdale, you just get on with it. There's no point in moaning and whining: that gets nothing done. You get stuck in, do your best and hope that you can build a business to hand over to your children."

That could be an epitaph for an entire way of life in parts of the Yorkshire Dales. But success needs more than just hard work and muscle. It needs brains, too, and the courage to take big risks.

This combination has worked well for John and Sandra Harrison and for hundreds of their visitors who, as far as I can see, have proved those Southern scientists right.

My three-year-old grandson thinks so too: Thornton Hall is his "favouritest" place in the whole wide world.