Sometimes, in life, you encounter moments which make you realise how much you’ve changed. For me, such a realization comes on May bank holiday Monday, standing outside my house and poring over an OS map with a friend as we discuss a road trip route.

‘The A59 is closed near Skipton,’ he says ‘so we’ll take a detour here and go up this road to get to the village.’ I peer more closely at the almost invisible line he’s tracing on the map, a minute thread of white amongst the green.

‘Is that a B-road?’ I ask, ‘that looks miniscule.’ He just grins. With too much glee, I think.

‘It’s a narrow road, but it’ll be fine,’ he says, ‘it’s such a nice drive.’

So it is with apprehension in my heart that I fire up the car (and my co-pilot, another friend, fires up the 90s playlist) and we set off from Harrogate for Kettlewell in the Yorkshire Dales. As we leave the outskirts of town, I wondered how this happened. I grew up in the country and learned to drive almost exclusively on farm tracks and B-roads. When did I become such a bougie town girl? Quick, someone tell me?!

I’m always amazed at how quickly you can get to the countryside from Harrogate (another indicator that I don’t leave enough!) and the drive to Kettlewell takes just an hour. There are a few steep climbs and my princessy car protests vocally, but the scenery is so gorgeous, that, soon, just focussing on the road becomes the challenge. As we get further into the Dales, the landscape becomes more rugged. We pass huge rock formations, ringed at the base with the tiny figures of climbers in neon jackets. We drive through snug sandstone villages and pause for a second at the tops of hills to glimpse the sun passing over fields in a patchwork of light and shadow. When we turn off the A-road, the car made an impressive descent down a 16% gradient (although a bus ahead of us does it much more gracefully) and soon we’re coming down the narrow road into Kettlewell, with not so much of a thought, except what a beautiful drive we’ve had. My friend had been annoyingly right about that part.

Kettlewell, Wharfedale, Yorkshire Dales.

Seven miles from Grassington in the Yorkshire Dales National Park, Kettlewell is a tiny village nestled into a comfortable little valley at the confluence of the River Wharfe and Kettlewell Beck. The village buildings are all old, honey-coloured sandstone and are arranged around these waterways. Steep hills frame the village, and a particularly broad, flat ridge of rock seems to rise to the horizon on one side. The village starred in the 2003 film Calendar Girls and is famous for its annual autumn scarecrow festival. However, we’ve come to witness its other annual celebration, the Kettlewell Duck Race.

After parking, we deal with the important business first; purchasing tickets for the race from a man dressed in a fluffy duck costume stationed outside the village hall. It’s cash only, so we cobble it together from the depths of dusty wallets. Each numbered ticket corresponds to a rubber ducky marked with the same number. There are almost a thousand ducks, so plenty of opportunities for a prize. Duckman is cheerful, and kindly poses for pictures with us, although I can’t help but imagine him as the cult leader in a 1970s folk horror movie.

Once I’m done with lurid fantasies, it’s time to eat. We go to the Blue Bell Inn – Kettlewell’s oldest pub, dating to 1680, and one of three pubs in the village. The food is glorious – steak and ale pies, chicken burgers and plenty of chips and onion rings. I have halloumi and a field mushroom in a glossy brioche bun, which is heavenly – crispy, salty and juicy all at once. A board on the first floor gives the history of the pub, including mentions of some shady 18th C landlords. The atmosphere is warm and cosy. Plenty of people have brought their dogs. We talk about Atlantic Drift and Japan and come away full and happy.

To walk off some burgers and to get ourselves hyped up for the duck race, we take a stroll along the River Wharfe, on a track which meanders out of the village through sunlit fields. This is quintessential Dales scenery – straight off the front of the Yorkshire Tea box. A cockerpoo poses for photos in a meadow full of buttercups, only his head rising above the flowers. Sheep mosey gently across fields bordered with dry stone walls which slope up to meet the sky. Small tumbledown outhouses dot the landscape and trees line the riverside.

We look for wild flowers and watch swifts chase off an encroaching buzzard in the wide sky above. The bigger bird pushes off quickly, irritated, but in no mood for a fight. My friends take photographs. We pass messages back and forth over the walkie-talkies their daughter has brought with her. A friend turns her ankle on a rogue stone and has to be helped back to the village. She is annoyed at her own pace, but aside from concern for her, none of us mind going slowly today.

Back in the village, we take up spots by the side of the little beck, with crowds of other people, holding our breaths for the beginning of the race. Bunting is strung across the water and the first ducks come down from the landing stage to excited cheers. They’re classic yellow rubber ducks, each with a number marked in Sharpie on the side. They don’t swim upright, but rather bob along upside down, or cruise along on their sides. A few get stuck in the foliage at the side of the water and have to be rescued with a stick. The atmosphere in celebratory – there’s plenty of commentary and encouragement for the ducks, who keep coming down in waves.

There’s something incredibly eccentric about the idea of chucking a thousand yellow ducks into the river and then encouraging them down the river, but watching the event is so joyful. The adults all become thoroughly overexcited. Kids and dogs remain baffled. At the end of the course, two men in waders stand in the water next to a length of netting which has been stretched across the beck. Each holds a laundry basket or similar and scoops the ducks up out of the water as they reach the finish line. I wonder who’s job it is to hold onto a thousand ducks until next year. I wonder if it’s Duckman himself – and whether the ducks go out to do his nefarious bidding in the colder months of the year. I hope so – it sounds like a Neil Gaiman story to me.

Needless to say, we don’t win this time, so we console ourselves with an ice-cream from a shop with a life-sized plastic cow outside, and sit on a bench in the sunshine, getting sticky, resting my friend’s ankle and watching the swifts working hard. They pick up nuggets of mud from the side of the road and fly them back to a nest they’re building under the eaves of a nearby house. Everyone is relaxed, basking in the warm air, and putting off the moment where we start the drive back to town and to laundry, stressful jobs and complicated relationships. Days like these are so good for bringing us back to ourselves, and reminding us of what’s important in life – friends, food, and simple, silly joys, like cheering for hundreds of rubber ducks as they book it down a little waterway in the sunshine. I might be a bougie town girl now, but I’ll be back for the scarecrows in the autumn.