WANDERING around all the beautiful locations the North York Moors and North Yorkshire Coastline have to offer is a weekend activity we would all love to do, but this Middlesbrough-born man is looking to make it his full-time career.
Andrew Davies, 39 and known as North Yorkshire Wanderer online, is doing just that, creating YouTube videos on the various locations and history that the region has to offer.
North York Moors and the Yorkshire Heritage Coastline have always been his two favourite areas and growing up he spent “a lot of time” driving to the moors.
Born from frustration during lockdown, the North Yorkshire Wanderer YouTube channel has quickly grown, with over 1 million views collectively on the channel.
Mr Davies graduated from Teesside University 15 years go having studied TV Production and is now using his well-earned skills in his full-time job and his wandering side-project.
He spoke of his frustration during the Covid lockdown to “just go out and make something” explaining that he has a “stack of video ideas”.
He said: “I thought well there’s no better time to go out and do this, so I have stacks of ideas of videos I want to make and I’m about 11 in so far.
“I look at anything that interests me really, I get requests all the time for doing videos and I aim to get around them all eventually.
“These videos take hours to put together, I’ll spend a full day shooting it and then spend probably a weeks worth of evenings putting it together.
“So it has to be something I’m interested in, and it also has to have a story attached, there’s some great ideas people have sent me but for me it’s about telling the story to go with it.”
He explained that Covid hasn’t really affecting his video production much as most of his subjects are filmed outdoors.
He added: “I really seriously started thinking about this last December, and then decided in January to order the cameras and drones and whatnot.
“I realised that as I was planning it, it is something that really restrictions aren’t going to stop me from doing.
“I can just go out and do my own thing and the vast majority of things I shoot are outside, so it’s not going to pose any risk.”
The first full video production on his channel, a delve into the history of Butlins Filey Holiday Camp, has garnered over 600,000 views, which Mr Davies said was a “big bonus.”
He said: “My first video was going to be the Scarborough-Whitby railway, but when I got my new drone and new camera, I realised I needed to go out and practice first.
“I’m in Scarborough at the moment, so the Butlins Filey video, which has over 600,000 views, was quite near to by house.
“I was originally aiming for about 5 thousand views and if I could get 10,000 it would be amazing because it was my first proper video.
“It was just a bit of practice really, so if I’d known it would get around 600,000 views I would have got my hair cut before I shot it.”
You can find The North Yorkshire Wanderer here: https://www.youtube.com/c/NorthYorkshireWanderer/featured
And you can find Andrew on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter under the username of @mymoorscaost
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