Joanne Harris's hugely successful novel Chocolat deals with the conflict between austerity and indulgence, and it's possible to detect the same pattern in her favourite walk - a long yomp through a harsh and dramatic landscape, ending up in a nice teashop.
Harris took parties of teenagers on this circuit in the Yorkshire Dales when she was a teacher at Leeds Grammar School, but her preference now is to go there by herself to savour the tranquillity of the countryside and allow the cobwebs to clear from her mind.
She starts from the village of Malham and heads for Gordale Scar, taking a detour off the stone-walled lane to the idyllic waterfall of Janet's Foss, where people leave objects in a little cave to be turned into fossils by the dripping limestone-rich water.
Gordale Scar is a great cleft in the rocks that excited the Romantics and inspired a rather exaggerated painting by the landscape artist James Ward in 1812. Harris says it looks worse than it is: she passes the waterfall, shins up a chimney, skirts a boulder and climbs the rough slope to the top.
"Once you're at the top, you can see for miles," she says. "Malham Cove looks very dramatic with its limestone cliffs, and there are some very precipitous-looking crags with sheep teetering on the brink of them - and occasionally falling off, which confirms my view that sheep are rather stupid animals.
"It's usually a bit misty, but you can see a long way, and the village below you is so typically English it's almost absurd, with all these little cottages in Yorkshire stone and gardens that win prizes - and some rather jolly tea rooms."
But it's not tea-time yet, and she sets off across the moorland, with its shake holes and remains of neolithic settlements, to Malham Tarn - "a big lake with frogs in, on a fairly flat piece of land". There she joins the path that heads back towards the Cove, crossing a fine example of limestone pavement.
"The first time I saw it I thought it was dinosaur bones. It's difficult to walk across it because it's very hard on the ankles and very slippery in the rain. The top of it looks like the surface of the brain, all crenellated patterns and deep fissures - kids really love it, and it's full of plant life, which you can look at but not take away."
Again there's a wonderful view from the top of the Cove, and the path skirts the cliffs, descends a stairway cut into the rocks, crosses a stile and follows a little valley to the village. This completes a circuit of about nine miles which takes her from mid-morning to about 4pm.
"I can drive up there in a short while, and I know I'm not going to come to any harm. I like just to see that it's still there and stare at the scenery - it's very tranquil, even if there are groups of people around, and it's such a big place, with such wide skies; the format is so enormous.
Limestone cowboys
Publicity campaigns and the odd prosecution have virtually stopped people sneaking mechanical diggers into the Dales at night and stealing lumps of beautifully-weathered limestone pavement for garden rockeries. The big problem now is what to do about the rabbits.
Rare plants like limestone fern, baneberry and angular Solomon's-Seal grow at the bottom of the fissures, called grikes, and in the blocks of pavement, called clints. Sheep grazing on the clints take the tops off the plants, but rabbits get right into the grikes and can destroy them completely.
"We haven't made a decision about how we can control them," says Dr Tim Thom, ecologist at the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority. "But we would want to do it in a humane way. There are more traditional methods like using ferrets, and they can be shot with air rifles and sold to butchers, which is more sustainable."
Only about 3% of Britain's 2,500 hectares of limestone pavement - half of it in the Yorkshire Dales National Park - is considered to be completely undamaged. It's now illegal to break it up in this country, but stone from limestone pavements in Ireland is sold over here. The Limestone Pavement Action group wants to make that illegal, too, arguing that halting demand would stop the trade.
The attraction of the stone is its beautiful pale colour and subtle shapes, created by water erosion of sedimentary beds left behind when shallow oceans retreated from Britain millions of years ago. Quarried limestone is not so popular, but it's now possible to buy artificial limestone pavement made with concrete, using moulds and dyes to mimic the shapes and colours.
Chocolat, by Joanne Harris, is published by Bantam at £6.99.
