On Beulah Height - Humanities-Ebooks

heroic, hopeless task). Wield started as necessary underling, a replacement Detective
Sergeant when Pascoe made Inspector, but in coming to terms with his identity as a
gay policeman (and latterly finding contentment with Digweed) has grown into
close personal friendship with the Pascoes.
Some minor characters have also become established presences— solicitor Eden
Thackeray, vicar Larry Lillingstone in Enscombe, idiotic and disaster-prone PC
Hector—but these are tagged or re-explained when they recur.
1.2.3 Mid-Yorkshire and Northern English Speech
All Hill’s D.-&-P. novels are set in the fictional, archetypal ‘Mid-Yorkshire’ (Mid-
Yorks.), an additional imaginary administrative county drawing freely on the land-
and cityscapes of the whole of Yorkshire. Detailed settings—villages like Dendale
and Enscombe—are fictional; real place-names are rarely given, but the industrial
cities of Sheffield and Doncaster (where Hill lived), and the cathedral-city of York,
are often recognisable, as are features of landscape, economy, and demography.
Mid-Yorks., that is, is an archetype, like Hardy’s Wessex or Paul Scott’s Ranpur and
Mirat a blend of typicalities and fictions making a place utterly grounded in the real,
but never restricted to it, or to real-world geography. To understand it, therefore, one
has to know something of the Yorkshire that provides Hill with his raw materials.
A very large traditional county in Northern England, Yorkshire stretches from
Sheffield to Middlesbrough and the Pennines to the East Coast. It covers some 6,000
square miles (15,000 km 2 ), and has a population of roughly 5 million. (See
http://www.yorkshirenet.co.uk/maps/index.asp.) Yorkshire is traditionally divided
into the North, West, and East ‘Ridings’ (or ‘thirds’), reflecting the Vikings’
division of land around the cathedral city of York.
Much of the North Riding is uneven rural land, the Yorkshire Dales in the east
and North York Moors in the west. A ‘dale’ is a valley; most are farmed both for
arable and dairy produce, and they are flanked by ‘fells’, hills used for sheepfarming.
The moors, often boggy, are high and desolate. Administratively the North
Riding is now mostly the county of North Yorkshire.
The East Riding is low farmland, some higher ground (the Yorkshire Wolds),
and a fishing coast, with Hull the only big city. It is still known as the East Riding,
and most is administratively its own county.
The West Riding has been very heavily urbanised and industrialised since the
early nineteenth century, but service and light industries now predominate. The
major cities of Leeds, Bradford, Halifax, Huddersfield, Doncaster (where Hill lived
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