The cotton-mills and coal-mines and the great docks of Liverpool that created much of Britain's wealth are largely gone. But in Britain's most consistently popular TV soap-opera they live on as if our fashion-models had never abandoned thick woolly stockings. The Manchester set for the grimy but warm and friendly fictional community of Coronation Street is the North Country's most popular attraction. Close by is the National Trust's Styal Mill, a recreation on a vast scale of the working past, right down to the sound of the wooden clogs, as thousands of mill-girls marched to clock on. Yet perhaps the most memorable sight at Styal is a modern one - hoards of effervescent schoolchildren taking notes on laptop computers about how technology all began. The North is dominated by two great old counties, Yorkshire and Lancashire. Yorkshire comedians specialise in derisory jokes about Lancastrians, Lancastrians vice versa, and both sets of comedians combine to abuse the shire of Cheshire, England's wealthiest county per capita, where newly rich factory-owners have traditionally retired to the region's ancient and beautiful "magpie houses" - ancient houses with gleaming white walls dressed in elaborately worked tuxedos of oak framing.

All this practice has made the North the natural home of entertainment, immortalised by performers as wide-ranging as Stan Laurel, Gracie Fields and the Beatles. Half-comical phrases, often with "the" abbreviated to "t", like: "Trouble down at t'mill", "Eee, by gum," and: "Where there's muck there's brass," are part of every Englishman's mental baggage. The spirit of entertainment lives architecturally in the Palace of Varieties at the heart of the industrial city of Leeds, second only to the London Palladium as the home of old-tyme Variety and music hall. An even more glaring example is Blackpool, Britain's most lavish, garish, popular and legendary holiday resort. Blackpool's Golden Mile of lights is said to be strong enough to confuse little green astronomers in the next galaxy, while the roller-coaster at the heart of the town's famous Pleasure Beach amusement park is said to be "the highest, fastest and most bloodcurdling in the known Universe" - this claim being one of the few things in Blackpool not subject to comic exaggeration.

The rest of England affectionately dismisses the North Country as "North of Watford" (Watford is a motorway stop about 20 miles north of London). And indeed, the North has always been a realm apart, presided over by its own great lords, the Dukes of York and Lancaster. When the two duchies contended, all England was drawn into the bloody civil war called the Wars of the Roses. There are memories of these wars in the numerous power-base castles, such as Warkworth, home of Shakespear's Harry Hotspur, and Pontefract, Shakespear's"bloody Pomfret" where King Richard II - first great victim of the Roses Wars - was murdered.

The Church, too, marched powerfully in the North. Its wealth and power live on to the benefit of posterity in the miracle of York Minster, wrapped in its fabulous treasury of medieval stained glass-windows, seemingly floating above the vaults like so many different sunsets. The North is not all castles, comedians and mills.

The North stops laughing when it comes to its food. Woe betide the outsider who jests about vittals such as liquorice allsorts, black pudding or roast beef and Yorkshire pudding - the last of which has spread southwards to become the English national dish. The North is also serious about culture, and has much claim to be. The monasteries of the North quietly nurtured traditions of scholarship and even scientific experimentation when much of the rest of Europe lay in dust or flames. Time, and the machinations of King Henry VIII, brought the downfall of these institutions, but their ruined abbeys - Bolton, Rievaulx, Fountains - usually situated in the wildest remotest places, are some of the most haunting and resonant buildings of the North. There are some of England's stateliest mansions, including domed Castle Howard and Little Moreton Hall, a medieval "magpie house" on a magnificent scale. The wealth of the cities has created fine provincial art galleries at Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds. The walled cities of York and Chester, still serenely prosperous and secure behind their ancient, encircling walls, are small city gems to match anything the universe has to offer, as they would put it in Blackpool.

The Battlemented walls of York and Chester echo the crags of the Pennines, the gaunt hill-range that every schoolchild recognises as "the backbone on England". The Pennines can be conquered on foot via the Pennine Way, longest, wildest and most demanding of our hiking trails. Gentler country, believe it or not, can be found on the Moors, particularly around Haworth, where the Bronte Sisters penned their famous novels of wild, unsatisfied longing. The Brontes made the area famous. Yet their bleak tales did scant justice to a part of the world whose characteristic stance is a loud, long guffaw and a wink at life's vicissitudes and (t') troubles.

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