RARELY can a window have played such a starring role. In 1945 Alfred John Brown, a West Riding businessman, and his wife, turned up as prospective buyers of a hotel in the North York Moors.

“The front seemed all windows,” he noted later. “Tiny mullioned windows, bulging out in four or five bays.” One window in particular captivated him. In dazzling sunshine it had a window seat. He recalled: “It was the most inviting window seat I had ever seen and I could not resist the impulse to sit on it.”

After touring the house with the agent, the couple returned to the same spot. “I had the window seat again,” Brown recollected. “The sun was still shining and I felt curiously happy and excited.” The hotel, which had been closed during the war, was as good as theirs. Brown confessed: “Experience warned me to be cautious, to barter about the price, to get the option of a week or so and have the place vetted by an expert, but somehow or other I felt sure I would still want to buy it. I think it was the window seat, and the sun, which decided the issue for me.”

And so Brown and his half-French wife, Marie-Eugenie, became hoteliers at the Whitfield House Hotel, in Darnholm, just down the bank from Goathland. Not yet in its Heartbeat incarnation, Goathland then had the character of an exclusive moorland spa. It was much favoured by folk who, like Brown himself, were drawn by its appealing combination of glorious heather moor, breezy sheep-grazed commons and charming waterfalls in small, hidden valleys.

Brown aimed his hotel brochure unerringly at these perceived connoisseurs of moorland scenery, wealthy enough to afford hotel prices. Whitfield House, it proclaimed, could accommodate “Just 20 people… the right sort of people. The kind who seek solitude and quiet after the turmoil of cities; people who love to explore the old moorland tracks and neighbouring villages – and return with an edge on their appetite to appreciate a good dinner. And to sit around the fireside on chilly evenings and talk or read or play bridge. And for those who disdain the comforts of the fireside and a good selection of books, the quiet road outside leads straight to the moors, where the air is like wine.”

Helped not a little by Marie-Eugenie’s French-tweaked cooking - early haute cuisine in the Moors, defying post war austerity – the pitch hit the spot. Over the next few years the Whitfield’s guests included the Archbishop of York (twice), top radio comedian Tommy Handley and – regarded by Brown as “reclusive” - a Mr and Mrs Frederick Attenborough - parents of destined-to-be-famous Richard and David. International guests came from 14 countries, and a landmark was the arrival of some Americans – a rarity in provincial Britain in those days.

But building up trade after the hotel’s wartime closure proved an overwhelming strain for the Browns, whose health suffered. Their family life (they had five children) also proved difficult. And Brown, who had travelled extensively as a sales director in the wool industry before taking on Whitfield House, found that hotel keeping left him insufficient time to pursue his chief love - walking the Yorkshire moors and writing about them.

For between the world wars Brown was one of Yorkshire’s leading ‘outdoor’ writers. Devoted respectively to the Dales and the Moors, his books Tramping Through Yorkshire and Moorland Tramping were top sellers. Collected in Striding Through Yorkshire, they were, and are, supreme in conveying the special joys of moorland walking: the wide horizons and sense of freedom, the intimate pleasures of the intervening valleys, and the satisfaction of ending the day at an inn in some hospitable moorland town or village.

Countless walkers who know little or nothing of Brown owe a debt to him. Though Bill Cowley created the Lyke Wake Walk, it is very probable the seed of his idea was sown by Brown, one of his heroes. Describing a rough crossing

of Bilsdale East Moor, Brown wrote: “Was it, I wonder, these very moors which inspired the greatest dialect poem in the language, the immortal Lyke Wake Dirge? I was muttering some of those wonderful stanzas as I stumbled through the dense ling.”

The first official guide to the North York Moors was the appropriate sections of Brown’s 1952 book Fair North Riding, a most readable guide to that historic county – the best of North Yorkshire many would say. Brown had struggled to write it during his Whitfield House years, which came to an end when the Browns sold up in 1951. Despite their failure to make their venture pay they are credited with setting the hotel on course for its success in the more affluent 1950s, just dawning as the Browns left.

Within three years Brown rejoined the wool trade – a sad retreat. But he and Marie- Eugenie retired to Sleights, near Goathland, where Brown died, aged 74, in 1969.

Meanwhile, though, his writings, too, had fallen into neglect. But interest has now revived.

Last year a splendid biography was published and Brown was also accorded an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Two walks around ‘A. J. Brown Country’, one based on Sleights, the other focussed on Burley-in-Wharfedale, Brown’s home village during his business years, have also been created. And now another tribute has come his way.

On Saturday April 28, a plaque in his honour will be unveiled on Whitfield House, now a private residence. It’s a joint venture of Brown’s biographer, John A White, and the North Yorkshire Moors Association, whose chairman, Tom Chadwick, will unveil the plaque.

Brown recounted his experiences at the hotel in two entertaining books, I Bought A Hotel and Farewell High Fell - pseudonym of Whitfield House. Tapping into the escapist dream of running a country hotel, these contain all the ingredients for a smash-hit ‘All Creatures Great and Small’-type TV series - but Heartbeat got there first.

Happily, Heartbeat’s tourism boom has left the Goathland district still largely unchanged from Brown’s day. It remains a Mecca for moorland walkers. So it’s an appropriate place to remember- and salute - a writer who captured the spirit of the moors. Towards the end of his third Whitfield House season Brown reflected: “Peat and log fires are the order of the day, and by night the oil lamps are glowing brightly. The moors are arrayed in their lovely autumnal cloak of burnished gold, and I am walking in the old ways again.”

*The plaque will be unveiled at Whitfield House at 12.30pm on Saturday, April 28. The ceremony will be preceded by a three mile walk, to which all are welcome, starting at 10am at Goathland’s National Park car park. Copies of John White’s biography of AJ Brown will be available and are also obtainable on Amazon.