THEY used to say that a week is a long time in politics, but it’s generally considered that a year is a very short time in the life of the Dales.

I mention this because it is roughly a year since I wrote my first column in this slot in the Craven Herald. This one will be my last, and it’s fair to say that the condition of the Dales does not seem to have altered significantly in the ensuing 12 months.

By way of an example, my first little essay was all about the big talking point of this time last year, the Tour de France coming through the area, and while we’re not expecting anything quite so dramatic this summer we do have plenty of other cycling events going on in and around Craven’s countryside.

However, I wonder if we should rely too heavily on the assumption that any serious change in this part of the world is bound to take centuries before anyone notices it.

True, the major features of the scenery around us were formed many millennia ago, when glaciers rolled back and forth across the landscape to create the hills and valleys we know today.

But a surprising amount of what we find so familiar in the Dales is heavily influenced by human activity of one sort or another - and that influence can be positive or negative, depending on one’s point of view.

For example, many people greatly value the presence of man-made structures such as traditional barns and drystone walls. Their continued existence in their present form depends on a range of factors, including planning policies (a matter touched on previously in my columns) and the health of local farming.

Even if officials allow greater flexibility over what people can use barns for, someone else has to either want to utilise them for agriculture or find another economic use for them. If farming declines further, then it’s difficult to see what other industry or business would benefit from maintaining many of our walls.

Nor could we reasonably expect a public body such as a council or national park to actually pick up the bill, when their budgets are being pared back every year.

So I don’t think I’m scaremongering by suggesting that many of these much-loved features might be in serious danger of ending up as little more piles of rubble; quite a number have already done so.

Of course, that’s not the only concern over land use in the Dales. Subsidies are crucial to many farmers. If their format changes then the way people farm changes, and that affects the way the countryside looks.

What would happen if the subsidies disappeared altogether? Right now that may seem a ridiculously extreme suggestion to make, but it may not be in the future. What would happen to agricultural budgets if Britain voted to leave the EU? Would they be maintained by a cost-conscious UK government?

One possibility, if livestock farming were to decline still further, might be that other land uses come into consideration, such as forestry. Covering more of the Dales in trees might well take us back to a more natural situation, before humans cleared the land, but it would certainly make for a very different landscape.

Incidentally, it doesn’t look particularly likely to me that any national or regional agency will step in to take up the role of custodian of the countryside. Decades ago I was told that at least one senior national park officer harboured the notion that in the future the park would employ a much-expanded staff or possibly farmers to mould the area to a shape that right-minded people would appreciate. I’m not sure what that vision was, but I doubt there’s any realistic prospect of the park’s budget running to anything like that.

There is, of course, a more overtly human face of the Dales, to be found in the communities that nestle in its valleys. The make-up of their population has changed down the years, a great deal more quickly and obviously than the hills around them. Some would view this as inevitable, akin to the natural processes that shape the physical landscape, but these changes are also important to the character of the area and they are influenced by a whole load of factors which are very far from being ‘natural’ processes.

I suggested in a previous article that we need hardly be surprised if certain parts of the Dales are increasingly inhabited by folk who are of a certain age and income, and who are not reliant on there being local services such as schools or buses, because those services are becoming increasingly rare.

I have nothing against the folk in question moving into Dales villages, but it seems a bit rich for politicians and the like to go on about the need to also have younger people and families in the countryside when services they may well depend on, plus affordable housing, are so scarce.

This leads me to another point; that in these days of already reduced public spending, so much more is available for services in towns and cities than in the country. I imagine the response from some people might be that this discrepancy is only right and proper because it is our urban areas which suffer from poverty and deprivation. But if you remove rural services, might it not follow that the people who need those services will have to move too?

This is clearly not entirely a ‘natural’ process; those in authority have made decisions about where their spending priorities lie, and it seems they do not lie in the countryside. These policy decisions help to shape the way our Dales communities evolve.

I am not trying to say these developments are entirely good or entirely bad. My point is simply that in many respects the Dales are not unchanging. All sorts of elements that we take for granted, even the presence of sheep and cattle in fields bounded by drystone walls, could alter very quickly over the next few years due to very human factors such as variations in policy and the economic situation.

If we want to ensure that such changes are for the better, perhaps we need to make certain that rural issues are given rather more priority than they are right now, sooner rather than later. After all, a year could be long time in the Dales.