Allie Henshall and Gavin Ferraday are partners in love and business. They own Henshall Ferraday hair salon, where Allie's sisters Darcey and Sydney work alongside them. As Allie and Gavin consider taking over a vacant property across the road, they are rocked by the news that a rival hairdresser has bought it. To make matters worse, Allie discovers that the new salon, Blade Runner, is run by her ex, Finn, and his wife, Mia Bevan. Finn fathered the child Allie claimed to have aborted. He left her when he found out she was pregnant, but he's back in town to try and woo Allie.

Heaton and Spike are the unlikeliest pair: two loners who have found each other. When Spike commits a terrible crime, Heaton decides to stand by him - an act of astonishing, almost foolhardy loyalty. There begins a chase across a vast Northern landscape of moors, rivers and dark woods, the increasingly exhausted fugitives being hunted not by the police but by a posse of farmers intent on revenge. No ordinary chase film, This Is Not a Love Song is a love story trapped inside the body of a thriller.

Farm life in the Yorkshire Dales isn't easy at the best of times, but things are exceptionally tough for Tom and Sue. Their eight-year-old son has leukaemia, and the doctors aren't making headway. Meanwhile, Catherine, ten, feels lonely and neglected; befriending Uma, the first Hindu at the village school, she takes her to the Moors. Something strange happens, which Catherine interprets as a vision of the Virgin Mary, and a sign her brother will be all right.

Set during the 1960s in the fictional North Yorkshire village of Aidensfield, this enduringly popular series interweaves crime and medical storylines.