About Jon Cosson

If you spend enough time in the villages on the southern edge of the North York Moors, you may one day find yourself held up by a cream MG rolling gently over a beck bridge, roof down, in no particular hurry. That will most likely be Jon Cosson, the author of this guide and of a small family of others like it, out doing the thing he waited a working lifetime to do properly.

For four decades, Jon worked at the sharp end of cyber security, a leader in a field most people never see and rely on every day. He spent his career protecting the financial sector, the industry that safeguards other people's savings and futures, and for years he chaired the cyber-security committee of PIMFA, the professional body for wealth management and financial advice, whose member firms look after around £1.6 trillion of the nation's wealth. He is also a sought-after speaker who has taken his talks across the UK and around the world, from Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and Washington to Copenhagen and Paris. The subject closest to his heart is the history of code-breaking, and what those wartime puzzle-solvers can teach us about staying safe online today, a talk he has given in the City of London and at Bletchley Park.

Three years ago, Jon began easing back from all of that and turning towards a different kind of life. Retirement, when it came, was never going to be a quiet armchair. God's own country, as he likes to say of Yorkshire, not God's waiting room.

These days the tools of the trade are spanners and open roads. An East London lad by birth and the son of a second-hand car dealer, Jon had cars in his blood long before he had firewalls on his mind, and he keeps a small, well-loved stable of rare and iconic classics, chosen for character rather than investment and driven rather than hidden away. One or two, like the cream MG rolling over the beck bridge, you may spot around the villages; a couple have become the subject of their own painstaking, advertising-free archives, written for enthusiasts the world over. The cars, though, are really just one expression of a simple retirement philosophy: find the things you love, and give them your full attention.

The village guides grew from the very same instinct. Having settled in the Moors, Jon found he wanted to share the place as generously as he shares the cars: honestly, accurately, and with no cash register in sight. This guide to Thornton-le-Dale, like its companions for the wider Moors and the neighbouring villages, is free, independent and made purely for the love of it. Nothing here is sold. Businesses appear because they are part of the village, not because they paid to be. Where a detail cannot be confirmed, it is marked as such rather than guessed at, an old habit from a career in which getting the facts exactly right was the whole job.

It makes him, he cheerfully admits, a slightly unusual addition to village life: the retired cyber-security man who builds websites for the good of anyone who cares to read them, and who can be found most weeks with his head under a bonnet or his foot gently on the throttle somewhere between here and the coast. If early retirement has a face worth borrowing, it might just be this one: busy, curious, generous, and having rather a lot of fun.

You are most likely to meet him, though, the way everyone does. Roof down. Beck bridge. In no particular hurry.