Rush hour in Dufton, Cumbria, starts at five most afternoons. Emerging from the slopes and grasslands of the north Pennines come walkers with bulging rucksacks. The village springs to life in anticipation of its new guests. Liz Rawlinson rolls up the blinds in the village shop. Cecil Coxon at the Stag Inn wipes down his large oak tables. At the youth hostel, Hedda Moore pulls freshly baked bread from the oven. It is at the youth hostel that, later this month, Bob Barnby, as north-west regional manager of the Youth Hostel Association, will have to announce whether the establishment will be shut down for good. "I don't want to lose the place any more than they do," he says, "but we have lost an enormous sum of money over the last year."
That loss was in the region of £5m - about a fifth of the YHA's turnover - due to last year's closure of parts of the countryside due to foot-and-mouth and to the drop in visits post-11 September. To balance the books, the YHA announced that it would sell ten rural youth hostels, including Dufton's.
However, the YHA's top brass did not count on the mulish determination of the villagers. "The YHA came up here and said: 'Oh, we know how you suffered during foot-and-mouth, but, unfortunately, we can't take any of that into account when we make our decision," recalls Ray Walker, a Dufton resident who helped to organise what he describes as a "resistance movement". The stakes are high - the hostel's clientele sustain the village's few businesses, drinking pints of Black Sheep at the pub and buying bandages for blistered feet at the local shop. Members of the resistance quickly tabled proposals on how they thought the hostel could be run more profitably. Then they hit the phones, garnering a number of high-profile supporters - the mountaineer Chris Bonnington and the Olympic champion Chris Brasher were quick to sign up.
In the process, the villagers managed to stoke up a bitter argument about the very nature of youth hostelling, waged between older members of the YHA, who demand that the organisation stay true to its roots, and the management team, who want to make it more appealing to today's younger, more discerning nomads.
"Our object is to supply them with cheap accommodation, on Spartan lines," wrote the YHA's first president, the historian G M Trevelyan, in 1930. This ethos has served many of Britain's postwar hostellers well - cold water and getting woken up in the night by uproarious snoring is all part of the fun. It is infuriating for the old guard to witness the organisation's attempt to keep young people happy: comfortable rooms, en suite facilities, the internet and (heaven forbid) booze at meals. The YHA's chief executive, Roger Clarke, is unrepentant: "We are fundamentally there to serve young people and provide the facilities they want."
The resistance movement has forced the YHA to postpone the closure and hire a consultant to draw up a feasibility study on the viability of the hostel. His report is expected on Barnby's desk in a few days and the final decision will then be taken.
In the meantime, down at the Stag Inn, the hope is that rush hour does not turn into hush hour - because there are far too many of those already.
John Sparks is a journalist at Channel 4 News
