My family spent the late summer Bank Holiday in the north west of England and instead of heading into the Lake District proper for a hearty walk we made our first ever visit to the Yorkshire Dales National Park, and specifically the market town of Sedbergh. What a delight. Not only did the sun shine on gorgeous fells for our walk, it also turned out that Sedbergh is England's official 'Book Town'. There's a festival next month. There are also a good half dozen book stores selling both new and second hand titles.

I browsed for a happy hour in Westwood Books, picking up some excellent old economics books – more on these in future posts. Nowhere can be more enjoyable than a bookstore stocked and arranged with intelligence, and selling coffee and cake too.

I pondered, too, the economic viability of small towns of this kind. The hill farms of the north struggle in these times of vast economies of scale in farming and agri-processing. Linking agricultural subsidy to farms of this kind which safeguard the appearance and vitality of the countryside makes some sense, not that I've ever been a fan of the CAP. But tourism is clearly essential too. This gorgeous landscape has long appealed to walkers and has its share of towns with shops and cafes and visitor attractions catering for the less energetic. The idea of building a distinctive character around book shops and a literary festival seems a smart one. Sedbergh went down this route as a means of recovery from the 2001 foot and mouth epidemic that devastated so many sheep and cattle farms around the country.

I don't know how well it's paying off in terms of visitor numbers. But I highly recommended it to all booklovers!