RIPON, England — Samuel West was limping. “A cow stood on my foot,” he said. “Again!” Errant hooves are among the occupational hazards on the set of “All Creatures Great and Small,” the pastoral series that unfolds in 1930s Yorkshire. But on an intermittently sunny day here in late June, they presented a particular problem for West, who plays the veterinary surgeon Siegfried Farnon and was preparing to shoot a cricket sequence.

A young veterinary surgeon begins to practice in the remote Yorkshire Dales in 1937, treating abscesses in horses’ hooves and milk fever in cows and prescribing diets for overfed lap dogs.

It hardly sounds like the stuff of bestsellerdom. But James Herriot’s first book, “All Creatures Great and Small” (first published in Britain in 1970 under the title “If Only They Could Talk”), and the seven books that followed became enormous hits worldwide, selling over 60 million copies by the time the author — whose real name was James Alfred Wight — died in 1995.