WORST fears were confirmed. Last week’s fall guy has a broken left arm, the offending limb in splint and sling, but not yet gone to pot.

The Last Legs Challenge will totter on, it’s to be hoped, as it did last Saturday on the 13-mile stage from Spennymoor to Waterhouses, where Esh Winning play.

On the Bishop Auckland to Brandon rail path, a cheery passing cyclist noticed the sling. “If that’s what walking does for you, I’ll stick to the bike,” he said.

Co Durham is greatly blessed with such routes, that westward to Waterhouses the most attractive of all. At its death, the passenger service ran just once a year and that, of course, for Durham Big Meeting.

George Courtney, Northern League president and former World Cup referee, was among a most convivial gang of five – coming up 74 and still butcher’s dogged. George alone had sandwiches from Marks and Spencer. They live well in Middlestone Moor.

DEAR old George, aforesaid, decided on bank holiday Monday to take in the game between Willington and Tow Law, arrived at 2.45pm and discovered the final whistle long gone. Undaunted, he headed for Shildon v Morpeth and learned that that, too, had started at noon. “Next time I’ll check the kick-offs,” he says.

THE day after the accident there’s a 12-miler to Northallerton Town, the route meticulously reccied by Mr Kit Pearson and joined by him and by Jo, his daughter.

Fresh from the fracture clinic, but aware of what they say about getting back on the horse, it seems prudent to skip the cross-country stage but to join the last six miles from Danby Wiske and down the lovely road to Yafforth.

A small group of Northallerton Town fans has joined the walk, smashing lads whose conversation varies from the dependability of the Book of Revelation (honest) to the virtues of UKIP. At the ground I’m made a Northallerton honorary life member, and feel restored at once.

“MIKE Amos, I presume,” says the moon-booted stranger in the out-patient reception queue at Darlington Memorial.

It’s Paul Knight, who runs Gudivers Cricket Club and with whom we’ve been vainly trying to catch up for the past two months.

With him it’s Achilles trouble, and while the column still hopes before long to get a game in goal for Shildon, Paul has decided that his days of active participation are over. “From now on, I’m sticking to umpiring,” he says.

MR Brian Dixon, long-time Chelsea season ticket holder – though he lives in Darlington – joins me for Tuesday’s leg from Piercebridge to West Auckland, via Headlam, Ingleton, Hilton, Morton Tinmouth, Bolam and a few particularly muddy fields near the A68.

Brian’s a bird-watcher, carries a pair of binoculars. “If I see a little owl I’ll probably just stop dead,” he says, but manages nothing more feather-ruffling than a pair of bullfinches near Morton Tinmouth. A rarity? “They are if you live in Darlington,” says Brian.

At Morton Tinmouth, indelibly named, there’s also a mournful memorial stone in a barn wall to the Jomatt Herd, 230 “very high yielding” dairy cows which died on April 24, 2001, during the foot and mouth outbreak. “A lifetime’s work taken in one day,” it says.

In West’s clubhouse we’re back to birds, someone else recalling that a hoopoe – “a strange-looking creature with a crest” – attracted hundreds of twitchers when it took up residence near Bishop Auckland’s ground last winter. “Seemed quite happy among all the old tyres and broken jam jars,” it’s said.

Strange it may be, but none has recorded what the hoopoe would make of an elderly league chairman, covered in clarts and with his arm in a sling, shambling along the back roads of Co Durham.

IF not quite on ice, “horrendous” weather has forced the postponement of North Sea Row 2015 – the attempt by Mike Tierney and Leven Brown to row the 800k from Scotland to Denmark, also part-sponsored for the Sir Bobby Robson Foundation. They aim to have another go around September 9.

Mike, rowing in memory of his sister – former football referee and Gateshead FC secretary Claire Tierney – hopes that by then the wind may blow westerly. “The thought of North Sea Row 2016 is unbearable,” he says.

….and finally, the first world heavyweight boxing champion successfully to defend his title (Backtrack, August 27) was Floyd Patterson, who regained it from Ingemar Johannson, the Swede.

Brian Dixon, also a Darlington fan, today invites the identity of three former Quakers goalkeepers – this incarnation and the last – who played in the Championship last Saturday. A fourth, it’s said, has just signed for Leeds United.

Safe hands if wobbly legs, the answer to that one when the column returns from planned holiday on September 17.