This is a picture of a field in Yorkshire, which is the most important place in the history of aviation. Rather than learning about the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk we should be taught about this sheep-filled dale near Scarborough. At least that’s what I was brought up to think.

The Wright bothers got their aircraft off the ground in 1903. Fifty years earlier Sir George Cayley - a Yorkshire landowner, MP, and inventor - was building aircraft which carried men. He had excellent sideburns and developed his ideas in this hexagonal workshop in his garden.

Cayley’s designs were based on a lifetime of pioneering research into aerodynamics. In 1849, aged 72, he finally produced a “boy carrier”. It was a triple wing glider which carried an unknown 10-year-old Yorkshire child into the air. It looks terrifying. But the child flew in it!

Cayley pushed on and built a “governable parachute”, to carry a grown man. In 1853 a servant flew the glider across the green valley of Brompton Dale. Legend goes the pilot was Cayley’s coachman, who crashed and promptly quit declaring he was “was hired to drive not to fly”.

Cayley paved the way for the Wrights but lacked an engine for power. His village is proud of him but even locally he’s not well known. But yesterday I went to the valley to get away from Brexit. And that’s the story of the Yorkshireman who (well, sort of) invented the aeroplane.