You don’t automatically link Ian Botham with Yorkshire. Like many another professional player, he seemed to be at war with the county and its cricketing chauvinists for most of his career. He was a Somerset man in his prime, together with the great West Indians Viv Richards and Joel Garner, at a time of fabled feats and riotous celebrations. But here he is, just to the east of the Pennines, deeply embedded in the castle village of Ravensworth. Both his parents were from Yorkshire families, and he came “home” 20 years ago, after his mighty frame finally succumbed to the grievous jolts which are the lot of the crucial all-rounder.

The village is like a redoubt that is standing easy now after a few centuries of peace. It is a long throw from the army garrison at Catterick. The houses are shoulder to shoulder around a large green on which, according to Harrison’s Local Charters, one Thomas Hulk slew William Stellyng with a club. Botham’s house is the most imposing: set back, gated drive, 17th-century core, newer buildings, outhouses and offices stretching back into the 20-acre estate; lots of cars, grandchildren, an adventure playground built into the trees; a lolloping wolfhound on the loose and plump trout gliding through the lake. Heaven on earth for an avowed country boy.

In the kitchen is Kath, his wife of more than 30 years and once the very model of a long-suffering sports spouse. Their marriage nearly broke up six years ago after revelations of his two-year affair with an Australian waitress. Her name was Kylie Verrells and she claimed Botham had said he would leave his family for her. There were tabloid headlines so familiar that they might have been recycled from the mid-Eighties, when he was reportedly having a bed-busting affair with a former Miss Barbados named Lindy Field. But now, in the age of the love-text, there were allegedly messages in which the England legend told Ms Verrells: “The mighty Beefy sword awaits – and that’s just for starters.” Some reports suggested that Botham was in effect running a parallel “marriage” with her, 12,000 miles from his Yorkshire home.

The big difference was that whereas he dismissed the Lindy Field allegations as false, he owned up to the affair with Kylie Verrells. You could say he had little choice, given the details in the press. On the face of it, he and his wife have made a lasting peace after some scorching rows and reproaches from the children. She is all smiles and goodwill, a grandmother at the hub of a thriving ménage; their 30-year-old son Liam lives with his wife and three children just across the yard. Injury has ended his career as a rugby player and he now runs an upmarket travel company, Botham Miller. He’s certainly a chip, says the old block, but not so… “Let’s just say he thinks before opening his mouth.” Not so impetuous? “That’s putting it politely.”

Upstairs in the old part of the house, in a room heavy with English wood and flock wallpaper, Botham Senior talks candidly of the many crises in his turbulent life and of his uncontainable pride at being knighted for his services to leukaemia research. He’s still as beefy as his nickname suggests but, at 51, there’s also the strong suggestion of Yorkshire pudding around his middle. His hair is cropped close, in a way that can make him look severe as well as sober. As a commentator – an excellent one – with Sky Sports, which is now his main work, he can come across as thoughtful to the point of restraint. Compare this with the flamboyant athlete in full plumage, putting the old enemy Australia to the sword with his astonishing power and technique, and you can almost see the passage of an individual from Cavalier to Roundhead in the space of two decades. Almost.

“I’ve done going to pubs,” he says. “I would certainly never walk into one that I don’t know. But I will go into a restaurant where I can have some good food and a nice glass of wine. It took me a while to say, ‘Beefy, you just cannot do it as you used to.’ How many times have I come out of a pub and someone’s put a key down the side of my car? Luckily I never actually caught anyone doing it, otherwise I would have exploded.”

All this is delivered in his peculiarly multi-regional voice, with the old Taunton burr rising when he grows emphatic, as he regularly does. It was those West Country vowels that fuelled so strongly his image as an agricultural; a most classical striker of the ball, to be sure, but at heart a huge boy just come from the baling.

“I could never understand why people had to be jealous,” he goes on. “Why not just enjoy it. I mean, I’m not jealous of George Best, or Tiger Woods, or whoever it is. I enjoy watching their success. I don’t know what goes on in these people’s heads [the kind who scratch cars]. I think, get off your arse and do something. Don’t just sit there waiting for someone to do it for you. That’s one of the problems we have in society now. Then we let the Poles come in and those same people start whingeing that they can’t get a job. They don’t want a job, they never did.”

It’s nearly 20 years since I last met Botham, and I couldn’t have been more intrigued over what I was about to find now. In the spring of 1988, he famously walked across the Alps with three elephants in the footsteps of Hannibal to raise money for the Leukaemia Research Fund. I joined the tour to write about it for The Times. He had come to the southern French town of Perpignan direct from Australia, where he had been sacked by the Queensland state cricket side after an incident on board an aeroplane. (Altercation between two Aussie players on the Brisbane to Melbourne flight; Botham intervenes; passenger in front turns round to complain about language; Botham places hands on man's shoulders to redirect him frontwards; charged with assault, fined A$1,000.)

On landing in France, he made a rather classy joke about the distinction of being a transport in reverse – an Englishman sent back to England from Australia. The elephant tour was, well, a circus. Most days on the 500-mile route the animals were parked up a mile outside the town and then loaded into their lorries. One of them picked up a tour-threatening injury to the nearside elbow and was sidelined at once. Some animal rights people arrived and made a huge fuss about it all. The tabloids nipped in and out to see if they could catch him smoking dope or misbehaving in other ways. Security was overseen by two French champion kick-boxers, les deux Michels. Some of the walkers boozed on the hoof during the gruelling legs of 30 miles and more. Eddie the Eagle showed up. And the entertainer Kenny Lynch. And Botham’s erstwhile drinking companion Eric Clapton, mobbed by boys with plastic guitars as we went down the Italian side of the Col de Montgenèvre. There were practical jokes, one of them involving a huge pile of elephant dung being shovelled overnight into the lavatory of Australian batsman Greg Ritchie.

Botham himself was then a massive national celebrity, as famous and fêted as any English cricketer who ever lived. Apart from his astonishing performances with the bat, he was also on his way to becoming the nation’s most prolific taker of Test wickets. Yet for all his talent and exuberance, he was, during the elephant tour, muted and modest. He was walking vast distances each day – distances that were sometimes miscalculated by the organisers. He would drag his body to his hotel room and nurse the raw blisters on his feet with not a murmur of complaint. Kath was on the tour with the children, along with other friends and members of her family. Once, she made an off-hand remark about “Ian and his little peccadilloes”, as if she knew his flaws but tolerated them. Her father adored Ian but would rather not have looked when he was making headlines because of his life away from the pitch. I can remember thinking that there was something truly perilous about this man, as if his boundless appetite for action and excitement could at any time implode and destroy him.

It nearly did. During his relationship with Kylie Verrells he became quite as foolhardy as ever he had been when stepping down the wicket to a rampaging Dennis Lillee. In Australia, he was sharing a Sydney flat with the then 31-year-old divorcee. He had even brought her to England where she had been seen topless with him at a friend’s home in Sussex. Kath, who has known Ian since they were teenagers, became suspicious. After the affair became public, Verrells was reported as saying she was about to end it as Botham refused to deliver on his promise to leave his marriage for her.