Over the Tops to Goathland

North out of Pickering

The A169 leaves Pickering and starts climbing almost at once. The hedges thin, the walls give way to open ground, and within a few minutes there is nothing either side of the road but heather and green bracken running off to the skyline. It was early July, blue sky with broken cloud dragging shadows across the tops, the sort of morning that makes you glad you took the older car rather than the sensible one.

The roof was down. On a road like this, on a morning like that, an open car earns its keep: the sky is right above you, the wind moves across the seats, and the V8 has nothing between it and the air. The moors sit close on either side, the bracken almost within reach, and the sound of the car is part of the day rather than something shut out behind glass.

The road itself

This is a fine road for an old car, and not because it is fast. It is open, it is visible a long way ahead, and it asks you to think about where the car is going rather than fight it. The camber changes, the gradients are long, the bends arrive properly signed. On one of them a row of chevrons stands out white against the brown, and beyond them, sitting on the horizon like something set down from another century entirely, is the Fylingdales radar building. It never quite stops being strange. Moorland, sheep, heather, and a great pale pyramid watching the sky.

From the driver's seat the Stag makes its own case for itself. The wood rim of the wheel warms up in the sun, the binnacle sits close and square in front of you, and everything you need to look at is where a car of this age put it. There is no screen, no menu, nothing asking for attention. You steer, you look ahead, and the road does the rest.

Goathland

Goathland arrives quietly. The village green is a wide sweep of open grass, cropped short, with a stone terrace of shops along one side, a village store, a general merchants, and a red telephone box standing at the edge of it. There is gravel to park on beside the green, and that is where the car spent the morning: French Blue, roof down, alloy wheels, KKH 295N on the plate, looking rather at home against the stone.

Outside the Village Store there is a pale blue and white Ford Anglia with a POLICE sign on the roof, registration WRO 509E, parked up on the pavement. It is a permanent fixture rather than a car that goes anywhere, and it is the reason a fair number of people are here at all. Goathland stood in as the fictional village of Aidensfield in the ITV series Heartbeat, and the Anglia is the piece of that everyone recognises. People wandered up, took their photograph, and wandered off again, in a steady unhurried rotation.

Living with the fame

What struck me was how lightly the village seems to carry it. A place can be turned into a set and never really recover. Goathland has been photographed by strangers for decades now, and it still reads as a working moorland village with a very large green, rather than as an exhibit. The Anglia is on the pavement, the shops are shops, the grass is grass. Visitors come, look, and the village gets on with it.

There is a small pleasure in parking a 1970s car in a place that a great many people visit precisely because it looks like the 1960s. Nobody paid it much attention, which felt about right. The Stag was not the exhibit. It was the thing that got me there, on a good road, on a good day, which is the whole point of keeping one.

The way it should be done

Nothing about the day was ambitious. A run over the tops, a couple of hours by a green, and the same road back with the light gone harder and the shadows shorter. Cars like this are at their best on exactly this sort of outing, close enough to be easy, open enough to be worth the effort of getting the thing out of the garage.

If you have not driven the A169 north from Pickering, put it on the list. Pick a clear day, because the whole appeal is the view, and it will be gone entirely in low cloud.

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