John Sheard hopes that in the rush to restore the tourist trade, we won't throw away the baby with the bath water

THIS week, I received an unusual present from Yorkshire Forward, the regional development agency which grows more active - and interesting - by the day.

The present was a press release, which is not unusual, but also a little packet of teabags and a biscuit, both produced by Yorkshire companies. The idea was to encourage me to take a break by going away for a few days - in the county of broad acres, of course.

This was just one of several campaigns launched recently in (we hope) the aftermath of the foot and mouth crisis which has plunged many small businesses in the Yorkshire Dales onto the point of bankruptcy.

Now there is nothing like a crisis to get people thinking about problems which should have been thought about years before. One of these was, of course, how should farmers be rewarded for looking after our countryside - which, in the case of the Dales, is what visitors come to see.

Also this week, the Countryside Agency launched a campaign to get more urban folk - the people who rarely leave their towns and cities - into the countryside. Amongst things needed to achieve this was better public transport and more facilities for the disabled, the agency said.

Well I could have told them that twenty years ago but here, buried under a load of good intentions, is a worrying thought: now that rural tourism has been revealed as a major money earner, is it to be exploited on its own road to hell?

Before the FMD crisis broke, everyone I spoke to on this subject was talking about "green tourism" - getting people into the countryside, preferably by public transport, in a way that didn't spoil what they came to see. Anyone who has sat in a traffic jam at Malham knows what I mean.

Now, the subject is barely mentioned - only the need to get the tourist industry back on its feet before it collapses.

This is an absolute imperative: we need visitors to keep open the pubs, restaurants and shops we use ourselves, apart from providing the thousands of jobs that help country folk get by in an area where employment opportunities are few.

So I support almost any campaign to get the visitors back except one: I don't want to see the Disneyfication of the Dales, a spread of theme-park type attractions which would no doubt bring in money and jobs but would destroy the reason for living here.

Methinks that the planners, and the present leaders of the tourist trade, have to tread with great care in the next year or so.