Neither age nor time have withered the love affair between Ashley Jackson and his fiery Yorkshire mistress.

After half a century, it’s a relationship that still fizzes with passion. “I feel an infinite pull to stand on the moors and gaze at her beauty and contours. Just like a woman she has moods of tenderness and passion,” writes Ashley.

It is the allure of his beloved home county that draws the Yorkshire artist to the rugged moorland of Haworth and Ilkley, the lively waters of Bolton Abbey and the rolling fells of Swaledale and beyond.

Yorkshire is his mistress, and he has been capturing her on canvas for more than 50 years.

In My Yorkshire Sketchbook, Ashley offers a selection of his favourite drawings and watercolour sketches, accompanied by personal reminiscences of the places that have inspired him.

He describes the drawings, taken from his personal sketchbooks, as “my love letters from Mother Nature”.

“I would say to any artist: never work from photographs; take a small sketchbook and pencil with you wherever you travel, it allows you to capture so much more than just an image – thoughts, feelings, the weather and most importantly where the light is coming from – for without light there is no shade and no depth to your painting,” writes the artist, whose raw sketches are done at “lightning speed to capture that particular moment in time”.

Now one of the country’s leading landscape watercolorists, Ashley’s distinctive paintings of brooding moorland have become synonymous with Yorkshire.

His talent started to shine as an aspiring teenage artist, and in the late 1950s he became an apprentice signwriter – good training for painting watercolours in all weathers.

For this book, he looked back through past sketchbooks and found a paragraph he’d written as a young artist back in 1971. Reproduced in a handwritten scrawl, it starts with: “Yorkshire, if not for you I would not be an artist. You are the one who made my eyes see and my heart feel”...”If I lost my eyes I would keep you in my head.”

The book features haunting images, from Kilnsey Crag, with the Lion’s Head rock overhang forming its chin to the eerie pile of stones that is Top Withens at Haworth.

A lovely, evocative book of “love letters” to an eternal mistress.