Goathland is a small village, about 5 miles from Whitby, in the North Yorkshire Moors National Park. In recent years it has become well-known as the fictional village of 'Aidensfield' - the setting for the popular TV series 'Heartbeat'.

Despite the media attention and the consequent attraction to tourists, the village has retained its great charm. The sheep still wander freely across the wide open grassy moorland which runs right into the village.

Local tourist attractions include the waterfall of Mallyan Spout, a section of Roman Road called Wade's Causeway, and the North Yorkshire Moors Railway. The railway provides approximately 18 miles of preserved steam track running through the spectacular scenery of the North Yorkshire Moors from Grosmont to Pickering. The line is owned by the North York Moors Historical Railway Trust who have run the line as a living museum since 1974.

The magnificently wooded north-west slopes of the Cleveland Hills provide a superb setting for this sheltered and secluded priory.

It was founded in 1398 and is the best preserved of only nine Carthusian priories (charterhouses) in this country. Only a small church was needed as visitors were not encouraged and the monks themselves only attended 3 services a day.

The monks lived as virtual hermits in small individual cells off the cloisters which are to be found on both sides of the church. Each cell had its own enclosed walled garden. There was a bedroom and study on the ground floor and a workshop on the first floor. One of these cells has been restored and contains hand carved replica beds, cabinets and chests (as well as the life-size and ghostly cowled figure in my photograph). This cell provides a realistic impression of the austerity of a Carthusian monk's life of work and prayer.

The Priory is owned by the National Trust but cared for by English Heritage.

Herbert Read was acclaimed as both a critic and a poet. He became a close friend of Henry Moore, a fellow Yorkshireman, and considerably aided the development of his career as an artist and sculptor.

Later in his life Read returned to Yorkshire to live at at Stonegrave House, near to where he had been born. In 1953 he was knighted by Winston Churchill "for services to literature."

My particular interest in Herbert Read stems from research into my own family history. In the course of tracing my paternal great grandparents I discovered that, according to the 1891 Census, my great grandfather was a farm labourer at Muscoates, a tiny hamlet of no more than 3 cottages near to the River Rye, and a few miles to the south of Kirbymoorside in the Vale of Pickering. The farmer for whom my great grandfather worked was in fact Herbert Read's father.

I was delighted to find that life on this very farm at that very time has been so vividly and poetically brought to life in Herbert Read's re-telling of the first ten tears of his life in his autobiography, 'The Innocent Eye'.

The book, with an introduction by his son, the writer Piers Paul Read, tells of the first ten years of his life at Muscoates Grange, where he lived with his parents and brothers until his father died suddenly and he was sent to live in an orphanage in Halifax.

Considered as one of his masterpieces, the book is also 'an exploration of the origins of the imagination, and the influences of his early life, on his adult consciousness'.

"To-day I found a withered stem of honesty, and shelled the pods between my thumb and finger; silver pennies, which grew between the fragrant currant-bushes. Their glistening surfaces, seeded, the very faint rustle they make in the wind - these sensations come direct to me from a moment thirty years ago. As they expand in my mind, they carry everything in their widening circle - the low crisp box-hedge which would be at my feet, the pear-trees on the wall behind me, the potato-flowers on the patch beyond the bushes, the ivy-clad privy at the end of the path, the cow pasture, the fairy rings-everything shimmers for a second on the expanding rim of my memory. The farthest tremor of this perturbation is lost only at the finest edge where sensation passes beyond the confines of experience; for memory is a flower which only opens fully in the kingdom of Heaven, where the eye is eternally innocent."

"The only sin is ugliness, and if we believed this with all our being, all other activities of the human spirit could be left to take care of themselves. That is why I believe that art is so much more significant than either economics or philosophy. It is the direct measure of man's spiritual vision."