I KNOW someone who enjoys foreign travel and has made several trips to South Africa, Sri Lanka and Australia.

But there is one part of the world which this son of the Holme Valley has never visited – Cleckheaton.

He has twice mentioned to me that he has never once set foot in the Spen Valley town which lies a mere eight miles from Huddersfield.

His Cleckheaton virginity emerged during conversations about that Frankenstein’s monster of the 1974 local government reorganisation, Kirklees Council.

My well-travelled friend’s point was that he, as a man of Huddersfield, has no interest in or affinity with the towns on the other side of Cooper Bridge.

To him, the Heavy Woollen district is what Czechoslovakia was to Neville Chamberlain – a far-away place of which we know little.

There are many people in Huddersfield who would see no reason to ever set foot in north Kirklees again if Ikea decided to close its store in Birstall.

And there are some residents of the Heavy Woollen district who are equally unfamiliar with Huddersfield. There may even be a few whose only visit to the town was to the Galpharm to watch their beloved Leeds United take on the Terriers.

Kirklees is a sprawling council, among the largest urban districts in the country, stretching from Marsden to the edges of Leeds and Bradford.

It was created in the 1970s as an amalgamation of 11 county boroughs, municipal boroughs and urban districts. Some of the smaller towns and villages of Kirklees look to Huddersfield as their nearest big town – but others do not.

And from the start the council was burdened with a name which means nothing to its inhabitants.

I’ve never once met a person who introduced themselves as being “from Kirklees”, never heard anyone proudly say they are “Kirklees born and bred” let alone “Kirklees till I die”.

In a county so proud of its history and landscape, Kirklees stands out as an artificial creation, a forced marriage between proud independent places.

So the Conservatives were probably on to something yesterday when they proposed splitting the council in two.

Valentine’s Day is a funny time to think about divorce, but there will be many voters on both sides of Cooper Bridge whose hearts fluttered at the thought of legal separation.

Not that it’s going to happen any time soon. The 1974 reorganisation left lots of anomalies in West Yorkshire, many areas which resented being lumped in with ‘that lot down the road.’

But none of the lines drawn on the map nearly 40 years ago have been changed in the intervening decades. Persuading the Government that Kirklees should be split in two will not be easy.

The good people of Huddersfield and Dewsbury will have to live with each other for a good while yet.

In some ways it is sad that residents of one part of the West Riding of Yorkshire feel so different from each other that they can’t abide sharing a council area.

Some people might note that it takes nine minutes to get from Huddersfield to Dewsbury by train and that maybe these near neighbours should learn to get along.

But I don’t feel that way.

As an outsider, I actually welcome the fact that people in this part of the world value their local towns and villages so much.

I like the fact that Huddersfield is different from Dewsbury, which in turn is not quite the same as Batley which is itself different from Birstall.

And I like that Marsden and Slaithwaite are similar to each other, but neither is like Golcar, which in turn isn’t really like Milnsbridge. For me all these little local differences make life more interesting.

A few months ago I was at open-mic folk night at The Commercial in Slawit when a two-piece from Birstall got up to play.

The pair sang a beautiful song called “They’ve Written Our Ridings Away”, a lament for the old West Riding which was abolished in 1974.

Even as a non-Yorkshireman, I could feel the nostalgia in the room for something which many people in the pub were not old enough to remember.

The West Riding lives on in people’s hearts long after a bureaucrat wiped it off the map.

One day Kirklees will join it in the dustbin of history. But will anyone think to write a lament for our dear departed council after it’s gone?