THERE is always a danger of slipping into cliche if one starts writing about the "end of an era", but I find I really can't help it when thinking of the passing of the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire.

That is not intended as a reflection on the impact of she had on the Dales. Far from being some sort of reminder of the past, she gave the impression of being a force for change; shaking things up and making them happen, if I may turn to cliches again.

Her contribution to modernising the Chatsworth part of the Devonshire lands and putting the estate's running on a sound commercial basis was widely acknowledged in the obituaries which featured in the national media, but the same could equally be said of her influence on the family's holdings around Bolton Abbey.

The impression I got in my younger years was that the duchess, as she then was, provided much of the impetus for change in that part of the Dales - and ruffled one or two feathers in the process.

I talk about my 'impression' of the dowager duchess because, though part of my family has strong links with Bolton Abbey, I only encountered her once.

In the late 1980s I had been sent to an event at the Devonshire Arms by the newspaper I then worked for, and the person I needed to speak to was busy.

As I sat and waited a small, energetic figure stepped briskly into the hotel accompanied by a little group of youngish, well-groomed men in very sharp suits. Their attitude was rather how I imagine courtiers would have behaved in the presence of a particularly formidable ancien regime monarch - Elizabeth I perhaps, or Catherine the Great.

The duchess was pointing out various aspects of the hotel which presumably needed some sort of attention, while her hangers-on mostly nodded smilingly and made notes; it was very clear indeed who the boss was. She cast one or two slightly curious looks in my direction, perhaps wondering who this distinctly inelegant figure was cluttering up her hotel, before departing with her attendants in her wake.

So if the dowager duchess was a moderniser in the Dales as in Derbyshire, why do I feel her passing marks the end of an era?

The answer to that lies partly in the aspects of her life which some of the national obituaries focused on; she was the last of the Mitford sisters, who had met Churchill and even Hitler (though she was not much impressed by the latter), a link to a vanished time of 'debs' and society dances which came to an end shortly after the upheavals of the Second World War and its aftermath.

However, for me there was something else, perhaps summed up in a TV programme made some time before her husband, the 11th Duke of Devonshire, died in 2004.

The programme was about the aforementioned vanished world of high society and had interviews with people recalling what all those balls and weekend parties at country houses were actually like.

One of those interviews was with the duke and duchess, whose recollections included a mild disagreement about who was the most charismatic major figure they had met; one plumped for 'Jack', meaning US President John F Kennedy, while the other thought 'Uncle Harold' had a better claim.

'Uncle Harold' was, I assumed, none other than British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan, whom I knew was linked by marriage to the Devonshires, but I must admit I had not realised until then that the Kennedys were too.

The Devonshires were, of course, not only a great landowning family but major political players in Britain a century or so ago. But I found it fascinating to think that as recently as the 1960s, when "the establishment" was supposedly being overturned, the duke and duchess not only knew the leaders of the greatest western power and its principal ally, but counted them as in-laws.

The French historian Alexis de Tocqueville famously claimed that the reason his aristocracy went to the guillotine and ours did not was that the British upper crust was expert at adapting to survive. One way of doing that was to make 'good' marriages, and it could perhaps be suggested that the Devonshire links with MacMillan and the Kennedys proved that point.

But perhaps the dowager duchess proved it too, but in a different way, by shaking up the Devonshire estates and making them viable for a changing world.

So maybe there is actually no contradiction here; the modernising duchess was following a long-established tradition of adapting to survive. Because of her background and connections her life was indeed a link to the past, but the work she did helped form the present and possibly the future too, not least in one of the most popular and visited parts of the Dales.

At the risk of finishing as I started and slipping into cliche once again, if anyone is seeking a legacy for the dowager duchess, maybe all they have to do is take a trip to Bolton Abbey and have a look around.