Unlike his passenger, Dales hill farmer Frank Brennand wears neither a coat nor hat as he steers his quad bike along the unmade road from Chapel le Dale churchyard, where hundreds of navvies who built the Settle-Carlisle railway in the late 1800s lie buried.
En route to Ellerbeck Farm we skirt the brink of Hurtle Pot, a magnet for cave divers, who scramble down the incline to the water’s edge with bottles of compressed air to explore the flooded caverns below. Across the dale, like a mini version of Table mountain, Ingleborough rises into the gun-grey sky, just as JMW Turner painted it.
The farm, sheltered by trees, is under the lower slopes of Whernside (736m or 2,415ft), the highest of Yorkshire’s celebrated Three Peaks. The other two are Ingleborough (723m or 2,372 ft) and Penyghent (694m or 2,277ft), offering a 23-mile classic circuit over the tops.
“Just push your way through,” he tells an inquiring rambler later, as he tends sheep in the farmyard. “So long as you close the gate, no problem.” Most walkers are fine, he tells me, just delighted to be out here in what he calls “God’s own country”. He adds: “I’ve always loved it here. No cars roaring about. Just sheep bleating and birdsong, like curlews clattering out on t’fell.”
Despite having no jacket, he claims to be as toasty warm as the 1,000 Swaledale, Dalesbred and Herdwick sheep he keeps dotted around like boulders on Whernside’s bottle-green slopes. He attributes this to “working through storm and tempest at all hours”. And he reckons the copper bracelet he wears on his wrist helps ward off aches and pains.
The walkers who pass by along the footpath are invariably wrapped up in Gore-Tex, with hoods shielding their heads as they peruse their OS maps. Frank meanwhile remains bareheaded, his long hair streaming in the wind like a latterday Sundance Kid.
His parents, Ambrose and Marjorie, first came to Ellerbeck in 1956 when he was a baby, plus his little brother. Their possessions? A Fordson tractor and shorthorn cow. How times change.
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