Hannah Hauxwell: The icon who represented the very best of Yorkshire - Christa Ackroyd

Today we celebrate this fair county of ours on Yorkshire Day. What a glorious place we live in.

Every day it is worth reflecting upon how lucky we are to live here and to live now.

But what makes us special isn’t just our towns, our cities, our industrial heritage, our determination to secure our future while preserving the past, even our rolling hills and windswept moors, it is our people.

And was there anyone so special as one who lived among us in quiet isolation until fame beckoned and she became a world wide phenomenon?

And so today, on Yorkshire Day this newspaper and this Yorkshire journalist celebrate the wonder that was Hannah Hauxwell on what would have been her 100th birthday and the fact that she perhaps naively, unwittingly and unknowingly allowed us into her world more than 50 years ago, for which we are all better for witnessing.

What is more despite the gargantuan changes and the comings and goings of life a century has brought, we have never forgotten her and what she came to represent, that quiet stoicism that characterises our breed, that sense of place and purpose which defines those of us who are proud to call Yorkshire home.

Yet that documentary and the sequel which followed nearly didn’t happen. Had it not been for a walker in the Dales who stumbled upon Hannah, her remote farm and therefore her story and told a researcher at Yorkshire television of the woman he had met there.

The rest as they say is history, pure Yorkshire gold. And when the subsequent documentary was aired on Yorkshire Television (it will always be named thus in my head) the impact was huge and the telephones were ringing off their hooks in the days when to pick up a phone was a big deal and one which she could never have even contemplated.

Too Long A Winter will always stay long in the mind. In Hannah we found an unlikely heroine. She found fame and yes she embraced it.

She was never the recluse her life often made her. She loved people and when when we found her we loved her too. Her life both changed overnight yet stayed the same.

So today we salute her and the Yorkshire way of living she came to represent, a way of living none of us had experienced yet in an instant understood. Because that’s what symbolises Yorkshire folk, we never give up, we just plough on.

We don’t live like her, no one did even among the farming communities, yet we instantly understood her whatever she said about just being “a plain Daleswoman… I am just as I am … “ And that is what made so special.

When we first met Hannah Bayles Tallentire Hauxwell thanks to the genius producer that was Barry Cockcroft she was just 44 years old but looked older.

Life was not kind and it was a constant battle to survive. The opening shot of her leading a cow to shelter during a snow storm perfectly summed up the hardship of the life she believed she has no choice but to live.

For a decade she had run the 80 acre farm herself after the death of her parents on what would now be less than £4,000 a year.

Her chaotic tumble down farmhouse had no running water and no electricity yet she continued because in her mind she had to.

Her clothes looked equally Dickensian. Her hair was white but her smile was ready and genuine. We could not believe what we were seeing.

It was as if the world had passed her by. I was a selfish teenager at the time but even me with my life plans which amounted to no more than where to party or what shimmery blue eye shadow or shiny vinyl single to buy was stopped in my tracks.

Twenty one million people saw that documentary and it both broke our hearts and opened them at the same time. Within days money was flooding in from all over the world.

Electricity was installed and for another 16 years she carried on much as she had done until ill health finally broke her resolute determination to safeguard the home no one but her family had ever lived in and she retired to a cottage just a few miles away, eventually travelling the world to make more films, unchanged yet now without the burden of struggling to survive.

When she finally walked away from Low Birk Hall Farm she was in her words “distressed. There’s chains that bind .. I miss the trees, the space and the water," declared the woman who once said she had gone three weeks without seeing a single living soul.

It was, until her sudden rise to fame, as if the world had forgotten her.

But my goodness her life and her attitude to life will never be forgotten even though upon retirement she mused “I shouldn’t think anyone will remember me now .. I certainly wouldn’t go to the end of the village to see me.” But see her we did.

Yes Hannah Hauxwell was a one off, that’s why she was an instant heroine for millions. But it is what she came to represent that lives on, or should do.

She was a woman of indomitable spirit and fiercely independent. She had pride in her family and her heritage. And in Yorkshire.

Commenting on the meagre £250 a year she earned by renting pasture land to other farms she famously said It would have been nice to have had a bit more money “but I’ve always cut according to cloth.”

On living alone she declared “there is nothing like a good marriage but to live under one roof with a man of different variance than yours is terrible.”

She was well read and played the piano. She adapted to her changed life in retirement as she adapted to seasons. “I live in Summer. In Winter I exist”.

Oh that we would all come around to that way of thinking, to enjoy the sunnier times and survive the darker colder moments of life that it inevitably throws at us all, knowing summer will come again.

Life changed for Hannah, after five decades of little change at all. She travelled to London to be celebrated as a woman of the year, but it didn’t change her.

She was funny, self facing yet deeply profound, declaring “Whatever I am, wherever I am, this is me.”

Life off grid is now trendy.

Being who you are, regardless of how others see you is now the secret to well-being sought by so many. Hannah Hauxwell was born a century ago.

She lived a very different life to anyone we had ever seen on our screens. Yet she instinctively knew this.

In embracing the truisms of life, so often forgotten, she will always represent the very best of Yorkshire, the wit, the warmth, the individuality we would all do well to embrace and celebrate today.

Happy Yorkshire Day. To those who have shaped us we salute you. Just as our county, God’s Own shapes us. And to Hannah happy heavenly birthday. We are all the better for knowing you.