Last updated 19:36, Thursday, 13 March 2008

Imagine the horror of falling asleep in Cumbria and waking up in Yorkshire. Through no fault of your own, mind you and with no more than a couple of glasses of damson wine having passed your lips, a new day dawns and you’re suddenly in another county.

Traumatic or what? One day you’re feasting handsomely on Cumberland sausage, Lakeland beef and free range eggs, the next you’re looking at a breakfast of mucky fat butties and weak tea. Not the most desirable progression for anyone, you might think. The good folks of Mallerstang and Sedbergh tend to agree.

There are moves afoot – again – to shift them into the North Yorkshire Dales National Park. To be fair, there are worse places to be and to be brutally honest, there are many, many worse places in Yorkshire to have to live ... I know, I left one of them.

But be it North Yorkshire Dale or Emmerdale – it’s not Cumbria, is it?

Proposed boundary changes seem to assume otherwise – or at least they intend to blur the edges of the question, so that any and every answer will redefine map references to create one big beautiful landscape of rolling rural idyll – with a dubious, redrawn pedigree.

There’s a snag though – well, more than one in reality. Identity needs more than a lovely view and nice neighbours to satisfy its needs. Identity runs mysteriously deep and is stronger by a long chalk than any national parks’ marriage lines.

“I am proud to be from Westmorland and I’m proud to be Cumbrian. Yorkshire people are great, with their own unique character. We have different dialects and histories,” said Nigel McWhirter, an Eden Valley man down to his last traceable ancestor. “To be taken into Yorkshire is not acceptable.”

It’s not. He’s right. If you’re a Cumbrian with a burning pride in your own special identity, you’ll know what Nigel means, you’ll relate to how he feels. Hell’s teeth! I’m just a Yorkshire woman, recently happily adopting – and generously adopted by – Cumbria, and even I know what he means.

It’s a friends and family thing. Though not the kind BT sell. The great thing about family is that it will always be your own, for better or worse it’s in the blood.

Friends are a delight because you choose them and if you’re lucky they choose you too. Asking people to accept as family, friends they neither know, nor under normal circumstances would have any inclination to choose, is a push too far. It forces a swim against the natural tide of comfortable relationships. No wonder Nigel is so cross.

With no intended disrespect to my native county, I discovered only a couple of years ago that the best bits of Yorkshire were on the road leading out of it. Maybe I should have got out more through all those years of living there but I know now the drive into Cumbria through dales, villages and market towns, over moors and through river valleys, up hills to vantage points for breathtaking views over Yorkshire’s aptly named broad acres is more than enough to make a Tyke’s heart sing. Family.

But on crossing the boundary between one county and another, natural separations become suddenly and simply obvious. Hills and mountains take on entirely different forms and textures, landscapes roll away to the horizon with a character all of their own. Why anyone would fight to mix and match those celebrated characteristics in a forced marriage of administrative convenience will be a puzzle to any not already oddly consumed by a love of – well, administration.

You only once need to have been a victim of boundary changing administration to treat all further attempts at it with deepest suspicion – if not to say dread.

Born and raised in an unremarkable West Yorkshire wool and textiles town called Dewsbury, we happy locals were shifted into a sprawling, overly-administrated area called Kirklees. First to suffer was identity, diminished pride followed on the downward slope, then the wool and textiles heritage sank into virtual non-existence and our small town became little more than a dormitory for a much larger one – the seat of administration, naturally.

It wasn’t broken but they fixed it anyway. Such is the sorry story of so many fractured identities – a story leading to so many finding the prettiest road out.

“We are not Yorkshire, we never were and we never should be. We have our own identity, as do the Yorkshire people. I can see no reason for this move,” Nigel insists.

Me neither, Nigel. And unless I’m very much mistaken, my guess would be that your splendid Tyke neighbours over the border will be echoing your views precisely.

Now, together all you have to do is convince those interfering, map-revising administrators... who sadly, usually have their way.