“It’s not that I don’t get unhappy,” says Sarah Brook, landlady of the Albion pub in the market town of Skipton. “It’s just that when you look at the grand scheme of things and see how your life is compared to other people’s, there’s more to be grateful for than to feel bad about.”

Her sunny outlook is typical of people living in the North Yorkshire district of Craven, according to the Office for National Statistics. Its annual study of the nation’s wellbeing found that residents of the area – which encompasses much of the southern Yorkshire Dales national park – were the happiest in the country, scoring 8.3 out of 10, compared with a national average of 7.5. The most miserable place in the UK was found to be Hertsmere in Hertfordshire, scoring 6.87.

Sitting in the corner of the Victorian pub with his friend Alan Capstick is 69-year-old Michael Demain, a retired metallurgical chemist who has lived in Craven all his life. “I don’t know whether we consider ourselves to be happier than anywhere else really, but it’s a nice place and we are happy. We might just be simple, I don’t know,” he jokes, nursing the second pint of the afternoon. “Well, it’s not because the bloody sun shines, is it?” says Brook.

The ONS asked about 150,000 people over the age of 16 four questions: How satisfied are you with your life nowadays? To what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile? How happy did you feel yesterday? How anxious did you feel yesterday? People were asked to respond on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 was “not at all” and 10 was “completely”.

Brook says she would have responded 10 to the first three and zero to the last one. “I wouldn’t do what I do if I didn’t think it was worthwhile,” she says.

This not the first time the area has been singled out for its high quality of life. In 2008 the high street in Skipton – Craven’s biggest town – beat Portobello Road in London to be named the best high street in the UK. In 2014 The Sunday Times named Skipton the best place to live in Britain. And in 2016 the National Campaign for Courtesy named the town the country’s politest place.

Simon Myers, a Craven district councillor and self-described “member for good news”, partly ascribes the area’s happiness levels to its resilient communities, citing the endless list of community groups and events. “People don’t expect other people to entertain them here,” he says, sitting in the Bean Loved cafe in Skipton. “They tend to get together and do their own thing.”

Another factor is Craven’s setting in a thousand square miles of moors and valleys. “I wonder what impact the landscape has on us?” says Myers. “I mean, there’s a great difference between living surrounded by all this massive, grand openness, and living in Hampshire with little farms and hedges and no trespassing signs.”

In January, the ONS found that North Yorkshire had the lowest crime rate in the country. Council spokeswoman Jenny Cornish says this might be explained by the “broken window theory” – the idea that maintaining order within communities prevents serious crime. “If you live in a nice place, you don’t want to wreck it,” she says.

But, as Myers points out, “it’s God’s own county, but it’s not heaven”. While Craven has comparatively low rates of unemployment, it’s a low-wage economy, with prohibitively high house prices and some rural isolation and poverty.

Some of Craven’s biggest employers are the Skipton building society, bandage manufacturer Systagenix and financial firm Computershare, but many of the region’s jobs are provided by small and medium-sized businesses. Craven needs better paid jobs so young people aren’t pulled away to big cities, says Myers, who points to plans for a new business park on the outskirts of Skipton. “It isn’t just picture postcard, this part of the world,” he says. “It’s a working place.”

Donna Vero, the manager of the Sweet Emporium, down the road from Bean Loved, is busy decorating the shop for Halloween. She loves what she does, she loves Craven and she says her three children – aged 19, 21 and 23 – want to stay in the area.

“It is hard for them to leave home because of the cost of buying houses, but they do love it here,” she says. “My son loves it because he’s into biking, so he goes up onto the moors a lot ... My daughter is travelling the world at the moment, but she’s going to come back and be a primary school teacher in the Skipton area.” Vero says she earns only enough to get by, but that it doesn’t stop her being happy with her lot.

“People in Craven aren’t rich,” says Myers. “They’re not poor – though we do have our problems with rural poverty – but it’s not somewhere like Harrogate. You can understand why Harrogate wins these things because it’s a rich place ... But it’s rather nice that we seem to be regarded as very happy even though we’re not loaded.”

So what do people need to be happy? “You need to feel that you belong somewhere and that you’re contributing,” says Myers. “There’s great satisfaction in that and we need more of it.”