The All Creatures Great and Small tour most popular with American tourists who are so overwhelmed by Yorkshire Dales scenery they ‘burst into tears’

Tour guide, Tim Barber, 58, owner of Real Yorkshire Tours, lives in Wharfedale and dedicates the best part of his days taking visitors on various tours - one of the most popular is All Creatures Great and Small.

Most of his clientele are retired, wealthy Americans, who are avid fans of the Channel 5 series that PBS Masterpiece has acquired.

“What I find is that ninety percent of my clients are from the US. It’s become huge in America,” Mr Barber said. “I was talking to a guy who runs TV and film tours, he wanted to include All Creatures Great and Small as part of his tour along with Downton Abbey and Doc Martin etc.

“He said that All Creatures Great and Small has got larger viewing figures than Downton Abbey ever had now. So it’s now the benchmark for British drama in the US. The fact that it is also on PBS Masterpiece over there, everybody can watch, it definitely accounts for its success here.”

Mr Barber said Americans are so overcome with emotion when visiting the Yorkshire Dales that they cry.

“The reason Americans are coming is that they are attracted to the landscape,” he said. “It’s not until they get here they are blown away by it; a lot of comments include ‘it doesn’t do it justice on the telly, you’ve got to immerse yourself in it’, ‘it’s on a much grander scale’, they didn’t realise how big the Yorkshire Dales was. They are blown away by the scenery.

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“I’ve literally had clients who have been so overwhelmed; a family that came last year with their two daughters, when we got to Yockenthwaite Farm, they just burst into tears.

“I was thinking, have I said something, what aren’t they happy about, they just said ‘no, it’s just more beautiful than we ever imagined, we can’t believe we’re actually here’.

“That has happened more than once where people have just started crying because of the beauty of the landscape.”

American fans of All Creatures Great and Small not only enjoy the scenery, they are also fond of the Yorkshire accents and dialects.

“They love meeting the locals, chatting to them in shops and all around and are very much aware of a northern and Yorkshire accent,” Mr Barber said

“It’s quite interesting, many of them watch Game of Thrones and you start talking to them about the Starks being the House of York and the Lannisters being the House of Lancaster and it all being down to the Wars of the Roses.

“They start putting it together [that the Starks have Yorkshire accents].”

Most American visitors end up staying for a few days in the Yorkshire Dales so they can make the most of the tour.

“A lot of the filming is in Wharfedale or the side valleys off Wharfedale like Littondale, Langstrothdale,” Mr Barber said. “But I’m finding more locations elsewhere in Nidderdale or Malhamdale as the series progresses. If you’re coming from York and you’ve got an hour’s travel each way, it limits what you can show people.

“We are now finding that more people are choosing to stay in the Dales so that we can actually get a full seven or eight hours of touring in the Yorkshire Dales so that we can head off and do larger loops around and see more locations.”

There are many questions asked on this tour that relate specifically to the series, however, Americans are also curious about something else.

“They can’t believe how many dry stone walls there are,” Mr Barber said. “They ask ‘how long must it have taken for people to build these’. A lot of them were built in the 1700s and 1800s but there are some dry stone walls around Malham and Kettlewell that date back to the 1300s and are still standing.

“Somebody with too much time on their hands during Covid ended up using Google maps and for the Yorkshire Dales National Park. He measured all the dry stone walls which, if you put them end on end they’d stretch to Sydney, Australia.”

There have been many other more obscure locations used to film series five of the show in Grassington and Americans have been fascinated by them. The tour of the Yorkshire Dales has also opened them up to the rich history of the area.

“The [locations managers] are thinking whilst we are here, [the area] has so many ginnels, snickelways and back alleys, so we might as well use those for extra filming,” Mr Barber added.

“Americans might have alleyways but they’ve never seen something as narrow as [the ginnels and snickelways], they want to take pictures.

“Sometimes people [from overseas] think there’s only history in London or maybe York, it’s only when they come out here and you tell them all about the lead mining, medieval times, the churches, they realise there’s so much more.”