IN common with most of the thousands who enjoy walking in Yorkshire, my steps usually take me to the county's high and wild places.

But every now and then my wife and I do a particular walk that embraces not an inch of our native county's wonderfully diverse countryside.

Though it's by the sea, it is not recognised as a 'coast walk', and while every Cleveland Way walker must tramp it - or catch a bus - it is not part of the designated route, in which it forms a gap.

As some of you will have guessed, Scarborough's Marine Drive is the answer to this riddle. A superb engineering feat, it is an equally superb walk - in either direction.

Head towards the town and the castle, proud on its naked rock, holds the eye across the bay.

Go the other way and the headland of Long Nab, up near Cloughton, with its stumpy coastguard lookout clearly visible, tells of the glorious cliffs close by.

Almost alone and zipped up against a lashing wind straight off a boiling white sea, my wife and I were walking the Marine Drive on the rough March day years ago when Prime Minister Harold Wilson unexpectedly resigned.

The Corner Cafe was abuzz (well, ever so slightly) with the "shock" news when we arrived.

In that pre-pager, pre-mobile phone period, I gave quiet thanks that I was on a day off and not reachable by my newspaper to provide background or instantly-acquired "insight" into the mini political earth tremor.

Back to the Marine Drive. On fine evenings after a day at Scarborough cricket, my wife and I customarily take a leg-stretching stroll down the twisting paths of Clarence Gardens and partly along the Marine Drive before beginning our 50-mile car journey home.

But it was only as recently as last spring that we walked the full length of the Marine Drive both ways - three miles in all.

It was a balmy evening, the bay calm and peaceful. Except at the headland, where a vast company of nesting gulls was noisily beginning to settle for the night.

At this time, the headland becomes Scarborough's own Bempton, with much easier public viewing.

We marvelled at how the birds occupied every nook and cranny, with some, doubtless latecomers, on the almost sheer face.

Properly, the Marine Drive is two roads. Opened in 1890, the Royal Albert Drive fronts the North Bay. Construction of the Marine Drive, which links the Royal Albert with the old town round the headland, was a more challenging task that took 11 years - 1897-1908 - to complete.

In his booklet Historic Scarborough, the late J G Rutter, a former curator of Scarborough Museum, notes that the two schemes, added to the earlier Foreshore, which runs from the harbour to the Spa Bridge, gave Scarborough "over two miles of one of the finest seafronts in the country."

Yet Rutter understated its extent. For the clifftop Esplanade, above the Spa, and the walkway from the Corner Cafe to Scalby Mills complete a three-mile "prom" - an unbroken seafront walk from one end of the resort to the other. Few of Scarborough's rivals can match it.

But does Scarborough appreciate this priceless asset? Doubtless it does.

And yet the district council is promoting a scheme that threatens to wreck the magnificent centrepiece of it all - the Marine Drive.

As part of an upgrade of sea defences, it intends replacing the attractive iron railings along the Drive with a concrete wall, 3ft thick by 3ft tall.

Some Scarborians are horrified. None more so than the town's redoubtable Sons of Neptune, the pressure group which, having achieved clean bathing water for the resort (for it was largely their persistence that did it), has adopted a wider aesthetic brief.

Leading Son Freddie Drabble says: "Our Marine Drive is entitled to the same respect as York Minister."

Well, perhaps not quite. And yet the Marine Drive does rank second only to an equally-inviolable York feature - the city's medieval walls - as Yorkshire's best urban walk. It would claim a place in Britain's top ten.

Convinced that recent high seas, adduced by the council as proof of the need for the new wall, are no worse than many he has observed in his 50 years in Scarborough, Drabble, a local solicitor, says: "The Victorians knew what they were doing."

Indeed. And perhaps what particularly needs to be remembered is that the Royal Albert and Marine Drives were not built primarily as sea defences.

The headland had successfully protected Scarborough since the Ice Age. The new drives were created chiefly to open up the resort. Their inspiration was recreation - the provision of pleasure.

Now, global warming might be a reality. But with more than 228,000 tons of rock armour, plus 4,000 interlocking concrete blocks, already being deployed to thwart the waves that pound the Marine Drive, it's hard not to see the new "wave wall" as the "step too far" described by Peter Cooper, chairman of Scarborough Civic Society, which also opposes this aspect of the scheme.

Planned vantage points along the wall seem unlikely to make good the loss of the unbroken views of the beach and sea allowed by the railings. Yet these are what draw the strollers, in their thousands, along the Marine Drive.

Their walk gives them a classic and timeless 'seaside' experience, as valid today as in Scarborough's Victorian and Edwardian heyday.

Even against changing taste, cherishing the best features of the past seems crucial to the survival of Britain's holiday resorts, struggling to stem the flight (literally) of tourists abroad.

When Yorkshire Water completed its sewage treatment scheme at Scarborough, it rightly doffed its cap to the Marine Drive's quality and character by designing its pumping station on the Drive in a style that echoes the delightful nearby Victorian Gothic toll house.

Has Scarborough council, one wonders, seen the latest Thames embankment, near Tower Bridge?

There, railings surmount a walkway with a swept up edge. Besides providing a precious extra foot or two of protection, it looks well.

Perhaps here is a compromise solution for Scarborough which could even enhance the Marine Drive. For that swept up edge resembles a wave - an apt nautical touch