I’ve witnessed the spectacle myself: cows bounding with joy, almost like spring lambs, on being released into the open fields after their winter confinement. If not exactly confirming that phenomenon, a dairy farmer writing the other day in The Daily Telegraph said something very similar.

It was almost certainly with quiet understatement that the lady farmer, who runs a 60-strong dairy herd with her husband, remarked: “Yes, well, from what I’ve seen here on our own farm, cows like to go out in spring and graze.”

She was raising concern over the growth of massive dairy herds, whose cows, permanently housed indoors, never experience a green field. Three herds in her part of Staffordshire, a prime county for milk production, have recently been absorbed by one of the expanding giants.

By coincidence I had just read of a similar huge dairy herd, 900-strong, in NorthYorkshire. The cows are milked three times daily. They pass through a “rapid exit parlour” that runs for 20 hours a day. Planned expansion, with new equipment, might allow up to another 400 cows to be added to the system.

A picture showed the cows in their stalls, heads through metal bars, feeding from a trough. One, brought out, was held by the farmer. All looked clean and healthy – even content. It probably wouldn’t be hard to find free ranging animals in seemingly poorer condition.

And yet the suspicion remains that confining grazing animals to a shed is to force them into an unnatural life - to treat them as machines. It seems ironic that while there is ever greater concern for the welfare of animals - ever greater recognition that they have rights - this trend towards mega dairy farming is going the other way.

Certainly that’s what the lady dairy farmer in Staffordshire believes. She calls it “ruthless and bizarre.” My own opinion exactly, but it’s good to have it articulated within the farming community. Meanwhile that North Yorkshire example is up for a gold award.

THE state opening of Parliament. Most newspapers published a picture of a smiling Queen in the royal carriage, looking far younger than her 89 years. But how much more revealing was the image carried by this newspaper – the Queen still gazing from the carriage, but with a thoughtful expression that suggested sad reflection on the passing years? She could be asking herself, as I’m sure many of her vintage, or even younger, do: Where has it all gone wrong?

REMEMBER the fuss four or five years ago – Whitby emerged from some survey or other as the hottest of hot property spots in Britain. Loving Whitby to bits though I do, I never even half believed it. Now, in another other survey, by posh estate agents Savills, to establish the top twenty ‘most desirable’ coastal towns in England and Wales, Whitby doesn’t even figure.

In fact none of the top 20 towns is nearer to the North-East or North Yorkshire than Wells-next-the-Sea in Norfolk. Just as well (or Wells if you like). What hope would almost anyone up here have a buying a home in Whitby, or any other of the region’s coastal towns, if the average price ranged from £322,515 (Brighton, No 20) up to £658,330 (Salcombe, Devon, top)?