AS someone who likes to go on long walks in the country and to ride horses, I spend large parts of my free time in the Yorkshire Dales, and of late, increasingly in the Ribble Valley.

I well recall two former colleagues debating which area was the more beautiful, one being a native of Yorkshire, while the other was very much an enthusiast of the Ribble Valley and the Forest of Bowland.

As a native of the Thames Valley, I wasn't really sure what they were on about - all the countryside compared to what I was used to looked pretty spectacular and crucially, there was much more of it, and was less populated with houses and people.

Two decades on, and I can see the obvious differences. To my eye, Pendle is wilder and definitely less visited than the Dales, which is quite extraordinary, given their relative closeness.

A scan of the pages of the Craven Herald 50 years ago around the time of the birth of the Yorkshire Dales National Park, and there were a good deal of articles about the impact of increased visitor numbers to the Dales. People from the towns came out at weekends and with a lack of public facilities, would knock on residents' doors wanting to use the toilet, or perhaps a cup of refreshing tea. Forward thinking farmers set up car parks and installed toilets on a spare bit of land, while others feared for their drystone walls as cars started crowding the narrow roads.

Interestingly, last year's Grand Depart of the Tour de France in our area raised similar concerns from the farmers and landowners, anxious that their walls were not damaged.

Another writer in the Craven Herald, 50 years ago, raised the issue of daytrippers feeding their sandwiches to sheep. By all accounts, they would park their cars up in laybys - a practice which seems to have all but stopped - and share their picnics to the livestock.

The paper's 'countryside correspondent' William Dale called on the same legislation forbidding the feeding of ponies in the New Forest, to be introduced to the Yorkshire Dales to protect the sheep. Sheep, he explained, were being run down and seriously injured, or killed, by cars because they were wandering onto the roads, encouraged by the lure of tit-bits. And signs made no difference, he added, because parents were always persuaded by a child calling for them to stop and feed the cute sheep. Today, it is not visitors' cars and sandwiches that pose a risk to the sheep, but their dogs.

Now, the Yorkshire Dales National Park is carefully controlled - some would argue its restrictions on planning are too harsh and are at risk of turning it into a place which is nice to visit, but impossible to live and work. Indeed, some of the more popular areas can get very busy, and unlike other holiday destinations in other parts of the country, can be busy all the year round - after all, who comes to North Yorkshire for the weather?

Over the border in Lancashire, in the Forest of Bowland and the Ribble Valley, although parts are covered by Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, it is not a national park. Holidaymakers are more inclined to first visit the Yorkshire Dales, which have have been a national park for 50 years, before heading across the border. It is, as a result, far busier.

I recently went on a walk to Grassington Woods from the village, and back along the River Wharfe. It was a walk I first did probably 20 years ago, when I first moved to the area, and back then, it was quite a challenge not to get lost and part of it took a route through Dales Dairies farmyard. Today the same walk is probably one of the most popular routes promoted by the park, is extremely well signposted and includes visitor information boards in the woods themselves, which are very well managed.

The walk I remember is long gone, it is still a lovely route, but has lost the raw edge it once had, there are lots of other walkers about, and the footpath is well trodden. By contrast, many of the walks in the Ribble Valley and Forest of Bowland are used by only a small amount of people, or the really hardy.

Places like Dunsop Bridge have car parks to cope with the large number of cyclists and walkers that head out that way, but is much cheaper than those in the national park. Walks and bridleways are in abundance in the area, and are fantastic, covering a wide range of woodland, moorland, rivers and some spectacular scenery, populated with a varied amount of birdlife; but are used by a fraction of the people who visit the national park.

On the downside, a walk - or ride - in the Ribble Valley - ought to be accompanied with a proper map. Footpath signs are a bit hit and miss, very good in some parts, but lacking in others. Many a time have I set off in the Ribble Valley and ended up to my knees in a peat bog, having followed the signs, which have then vanished. Stiles are often not of the same consistency in the Ribble Valley, which can be tricky if you have a heavy dog to haul over, and then there's the field of cattle, seemingly more numerous across the border.

At the end of the day, we are extremely lucky to live where we do - whether you are a fan of the Yorkshire Dales, or the Ribble Valley.