Early in September, you could hardly move at Leeds city station for young men and women handing out carrier bags saying Holiday in Yorkshire!, each containing a biscuit made in Batley and a packet of our chauvinistic county's Yorkshire Tea.

It seemed a forlorn endeavour as summer turned into autumn, temperatures dropped, and the foot-and-mouth headlines relentlessly continued. But then came September 11 and the terrible tragedy in New York.

Today, we learn that a million holiday flights have been cancelled in the wake of the disaster, an action - like the anthrax panic - full of human lack of logic, yet, humanly, very understandable. Suddenly the Yorkshire Dales, or the North Pennines, look a lot more attractive for a winterbreak. And what about the Lake District? Or the castles and abbeys of the Northumberland coast?

There could scarcely be a better time to go, not just for the customer-starved cafes and B&Bs, whose season was wrecked by foot-and-mouth, but for selfish reasons too. A week ago, I had tea in front of the log fire at Judith Paris's supposed cottage in Watendlath, a Lake District valley as close to heaven as anywhere you will find on Earth. Winding up the single-track road, we didn't have to give way to a single car; coming back, we met two.

This is extraordinary by Lake District standards; and the fells also show the blessings of a season without sponsored walks or individual ramblers' tramping feet. Tormentil and other wildflowers spill over the rocks on the path down to Rosthwaite and the jaws of Borrowdale. That alopecia, which rubs out the grass on much-frequented footpaths, has gone.

This is the result of three month's purdah for Watendlath when walkers were banned - a regulation which still covers the great, bulky triangle of Skiddaw to protect the rare Herdwick flocks, but has otherwise been lifted. Like venturing on to an army range at weekends when the guns are silent, you have a sense of almost rediscovering the National Park as it was before we pleasure-seekers over-ran it.

You will also be doing a virtuous turn to the battered local holiday trade, although this turn of events - as sudden and dramatic as the pyres and the disinfectant spray - prompts thoughts about tourism's pleas for help and government support when times went so unexpectedly bad. Will there be talk, now, of paying subsidy back if a million of us book English holidays between now and Christmas? If there is, pigs, if not people, will fly.