It's easy to be glib about Yorkshire - for much of the country, England's largest county is shorthand for "up north" and all its cliched connotations, from flat caps and factories to tightfisted locals. For their part, many Yorkshire born-and-bred are happy to play to the prejudice of southerners, adopting an attitude roughly on a par with that of Texans or Australians in strongly suggesting that there's really nowhere else worth considering. In its sheer size at least, Yorkshire does have a case for primacy, while its most striking characteristics - from dialect to landscape - derive from a long history of settlement, invention and independence that's still a source of pride today.