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This is East Riddlesden Hall in West Yorkshire, our last port of call on our recent canal holiday. At the end of the 18th century, the Bingley to Skipton section of the Leeds to Liverpool Canal cut right through the estate, bringing vast changes to what had up until then been largely a rural landscape and way of life. These days the house and grounds are a small oasis in the urban sprawl of Bradford. For me East Riddlesden Hall has it all. It's small enough to live in without rattling around like a marble in a vast box (see Hardwick Hall), it's ancient (a medieval hall was first built there in the 14th century), it's eccentric, it has atmosphere in spades, it has a romantic ruin attached, it has a falcon mews and several resident ghosts. Who could ask for more? It is in fact so haunted that it has been featured on the TV programme Most Haunted. Only the week before I visited, the Grey Lady had been sighted in the tea rooms. Apparently she is the ghost of a Tudor lady whos...

"Only Mills and Boon can rival British intelligence," says MI5's official historian. This fascinating quotation was in The Guardian newspaper today, as related by Charlotte Higgins from the Hay Festival. She goes on to write that Christopher Andrew, who spent years as a member of of the service whilst he undertook the research for his book Defence of the Realm, claimed that the human resources consultants employed to discover the levels of job satisfaction at the British domestic intelligence service had found that there was "only one organisation they had investigated that had a higher morale: Mills & Boon." A Spooks/M&B collaboration must surely be in the offing. Of course this confirms for those of us in the know what we already knew: romance books make you happy. And so does spying. Allegedly. http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/jun/02/christopher-andrew-mi5

This is me, with Monty the dog, sitting in the courtyard of Skipton Castle under the yew tree that was planted in 1659 by Lady Anne Clifford to mark the repair of the castle after the English Civil War. Despite enduring a three year siege during the Civil War, Skipton is one of the most complete medieval castles in England. The yew tree stands in the Conduit Court (so called because it was where the spring water bubbled out) in the centre of the castle, surrounded by a range of early Tudor buildings that remain unaltered and intact. I've never seen a tree growing inside a castle courtyard like this before although my husband swears he has been somewhere else where there was a tree just like this - and he has been racking his brains ever since to try and remember where it was! It was very peaceful and cool to sit beneath this ancient tree on what was a very hot day and read all about the castle in the guidebook. It was also very nice to be able to take our very well-behaved dog int...

After we picked up our narrowboat we set off westward along the Leeds to Liverpool Canal. Our first stop was at Kildwick in the area known as Craven in Yorkshire. During the 1970s I sang in the choir of the parish church here with my grandparents and I had not been back since they left when I was 11 years old. It was exactly as I remembered it and I felt a very strong sense of nostalgia. The original Saxon church at Kildwick dated back to the 10th century. It had a heavy oak- timbered roof thatched with straw overlaid with turf and a very broad low tower. Some of the stone from the Saxon churchyard cross was found embedded in the wall of the current church chancel in the early 20th century. The rest of this early church has vanished, replaced by a medieval building that is very beautiful. In the same period the earliest bridge over the River Aire was built at Kildwick, costing £21.12.09. The box pews or ‘close pues’ or ‘privey closets’ as they were called in the 17th century with door...