The Catskills — gentle, forested mountains peppered with lakes and streams — are only two hours by car from Manhattan.

I know, I’ve driven it. New York City in the summer is notoriously, swelteringly hot and humid. But in upstate New York — you go up the Hudson Valley and left a bit to find the Catskills — it is cooler and fresher. It’s amazing that more Brits don’t know about this Arcadia. Yet all the time I was there, I heard not one English accent.

Come to that, America itself is only starting to rediscover what is a colourful part of its own heritage: the Catskills used to be the summer holiday destination for New Yorkers, and particularly working-class New Yorkers. Although it first began to be exploited with the arrival of railways in the 19th century, its heyday as a resort area was from the 1930s to the early 1960s.

The Catskills meant two things: “bungalow colonies”, which functioned much like summer camps, and big resort hotels, complete with ballrooms, golf courses and entertainers ranging from the dire to the world-class. This was the America of films such as Broadway Danny Rose and Dirty Dancing. Everyone from Mel Brooks to Neil Sedaka got their break here — though the notoriously critical Catskill audiences apparently hated Woody Allen.

Because it was the favoured summer haunt of New York City’s Jewish community, the region came to be dubbed the “borscht belt” (the Wasps headed for Long Island or New England). Even in upmarket resort hotels such as the once celebrated Grossinger’s, where statesmen rubbed shoulders with top sportsmen and singers — it even had its own airfield — everyone understood that you didn’t ask for bacon at breakfast.

Huge numbers of people flocked to the Catskills during what is now referred to in hushed tones simply as “The Era”. And just like Britain’s seaside, with its holiday camps and end-of-the-pier shows, the Catskills hit hard times as soon as package holidays made overseas travel easy. It used to be jammed with cars; today, it is almost eerily peaceful.

Old prejudices die hard, however. When I told a New York colleague that the Pearman family was decamping to the Catskills for a holiday, his reaction was an incredulous “Why?”. It was as if an American were to choose Skegness for his holiday. Skegness may have many virtues, Butlins among them, but the Lincolnshire coast is no match for the Catskills. It’s a bit like the Lake District, only with empty roads, more trees and more interesting animals — chipmunks and woodchucks, deer, hummingbirds and, they say, the occasional bear. We didn’t see a bear. But we did see a very handsome skunk.

To be exact, we were not quite in the heart of the borscht belt. There are four counties in the Catskills region, and the most resort-ish and built-up of the four, nearest NYC, has always been Sullivan County. But we weren’t looking for fading resorts or tawdry glamour. We wanted rural tranquillity, the kind of lakeside existence immortalised by Henry David Thoreau in Walden, his back-to-basics 19th-century philosophical tract. Only with a dishwasher and cable TV: we don’t like to rough it too much. So we stationed ourselves further out, on the edge of the 100-year-old Catskill Park, in Ulster County. That way, we got not only the gentle slopes of the Catskills, but the nearby dramatic ridge of the Shawangunks, and beyond them the Hudson Valley. Three aspects of rural America for the price of one.

Nobody, to my knowledge, arranges package holidays to the Catskills. Dozens may now declare themselves, but I’m not interested. This was a self- arranged holiday. I had first caught a glimpse of the region a couple of years ago, when I had gone up the Hudson Valley to look at the new Frank Gehry- designed concert hall at Bard College, home to a summer music festival. Around that time, the children, saturated with American culture in the form of cartoons and MTV, were pressing me for a visit to the States. There are six of us, so this was looking expensive. Then the dollar conveniently got very cheap, so the time was right. This, I thought, was surely the place to correct preconceptions. Find a house to rent in the backwoods, take a flight to New York, pick up a hire car: job done. And that was what we did.

The key to it all was finding the house. Although rural America does not have the same highly organised system of holiday lets as Britain and the rest of Europe, a bit of searching on the web or by phone yields results. The counties of the Catskills — Sullivan, Ulster, Greene and Delaware — all have tourist offices, and these have accommodation lists. The area is still more geared to resorts, camps and B&B establishments than it is to self-catering homes, but they are there to be found.

One cultural difference is the New York tradition of shifting to the country not for a couple of weeks, but for the entire summer. It is still quite usual for a family to stay out in the mountains for the whole season while the breadwinner makes weekend visits from work in the sweltering city (the wealthy, meanwhile, take their work with them). So, some landlords are interested only in long leases. Others, however, are well used to shorter lets.

It didn’t take too long to find what I wanted: a house with an acre of land on the shore of a small lake, high up in the Cat- skills, about six miles away from a town with shops. In Europe, there would be more local shops; in America, you drive. And that’s all right, because car hire is cheaper than in Europe. You can’t do the Catskills by public transport: you’d simply be stranded.

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