A BOOK called Remarkable Cricket Grounds, thus remarkably understated, has arrived. It’s simply stupendous.

Wonderfully photographed, the book features 78 homes of cricket across five continents, four of the 78 in the North-East or North Yorkshire.

It’s clear, however, that both author and editor are particularly head over heels over the ground at Spout House, divine in its improbability, a creel cowping familiar to those fielding in that deepest of deeps.

Backtrack readers have themselves been long familiar, of course, with the guards-sloping sheep pasture between Stokesley and Helmsley which for 150 little-changing years has been home to the Feversham League club.

W G Grace is said, perhaps apocryphally, to have registered a golden duck there. Prince Harry, more certainly, has twice played at Spout while a house guest nearby.

Out-fielders, the book notes, need a relay system to return the ball uphill to the wicket, the pavilion is “rather basic” and the midges are bad, though not as wicked as at Castleton. Sadly, there’s no record of Spout teams being particularly God-fearing, otherwise they could have claimed the moral high ground as well.

The column’s influence on its inclusion is twice acknowledged in the 223-page coffee table book, though it’s Jill Mead’s inspired images – “wonderfully illustrating that where there’s a will there can be a game,” says editor Frank Hopkinson – which most eloquently speak of Spout.

Grass-rooted, Jill has long known the place. Harry, her journalist father, is the sage of Spout House as of much else in rural North Yorkshire.

Perhaps influenced by the clothes posts at long-on, Jill is also compiling a book of photographs of washing lines. As they say in the business of journalism, it just needs a peg upon which to hang it.

THE grounds at Raby Castle and Bamburgh Castle are also included, together with North Marine Road – ever-festive – at Scarborough.

Raby’s reckoned cricket’s first County Durham venue, the Duke of Cleveland’s XI against the Duke of Northumberland’s XI in 1751. Book editor Brian Levison is happy to tell the tale – another Backtrack original – of the two Raby batsmen who, running between the wickets but still watching the ball’s progress to the boundary, collided one with another and both ended in Darlington hospital.

Doubtless after consulting survivors, Brian insists that the game was at Heighington. I could have sworn that it was in the shadow of the castle.

Have they forgotten? Perhaps it’s those bangs on the head.

SINCE the book’s alphabetically arranged, Spout finds its place – and with more pages than any other – between Sydney Showground Stadium and St Peter’s Cricket Club in Rome, a ground built by Mussolini for a different purpose and used by the Vatican XI just once.

Whether it’s infallible is, sadly, not recorded.

Others include St Moritz CC, where they play on the frozen lake, and the Maifeld in Berlin, less pacifically used for some of Hitler’s biggest rallies.

Alphabetically, they range from the Adelaide Oval to the Yoghuni Cricket Ground in South Korea, built for the 2014 Asian Games. Elsewhere there’s Keswick and Coniston, Bridgetown to Bourneville (which doubtless has a chocolate box setting).

The photographs are without exception magnificent, the text informed and affectionate. Like the Elysian field that is Spout House, the book is an incomparable gem.

*Remarkable Cricket Grounds by Brian Levison is published by Pavilion Books and costs £25.

REMARKABLE Cricket Grounds is a little behind the times, however, to suppose that the Feversham League has four teams. This summer it operated with just three, Spout opposed by High Farndale – little less precipitous – and by Slingsby on the flat. League secretary Charles Allenby reports that, at the end of the summer, all three agreed to continue next year. That determination, he hopes, will be confirmed at the annual meeting in the spring.

AN 85th birthday present last month, long-time former Echo sports writer Ray Robertson received Lawrie McMenemy’s new autobiography. Ray kindly lends it, particularly recommends the chapter – headed “The original special one” – on his old friend Brian Clough.

“I have never been able to figure why such an accomplished man allowed himself to be destroyed (by alcohol),” McMenemy writes.

There are familiar stories from his time as Bishop Auckland’s first “professional” manager – before that the committee had picked the team – but what’s particularly enlightening is the account of his time at Sunderland.

The chapter’s headed “Roker Hell”, talks of “two years of near-total misery”, of “a dreadful experience for all involved” and of a club “crumbling on rotten foundations” long before his arrival.

That was in the summer of 1985, head-hunted from Southampton as both manager and managing director by club chairman Tom Cowie – a man with such total control that club secretary Jeff Davidson even stood up when talking to Cowie on the phone.

Roker Park was antiquated – “a dreadful mess for a so-called top stadium” – the home dressing room infested with cockroaches which scuttled whenever someone switched on the light.

Things weren’t helped by what he supposes political in-fighting, particularly between Cowie and fellow director Barry Batey – “all smiles and bull***t.”

Sunderland lost their first five matches without scoring a goal – which may almost seem familiar – finishing 18th in the old second division. The following season they were again struggling near the bottom when McMenemy left with seven matches remaining.

Not even Bob Stokoe’s return could save them from a first-ever spell in the third tier of English football. The former Gateshead Council education department clerk falls back upon the joke apparently first told by his old friend Jimmy Tarbuck: “The one thing that Lawrie McMenemy and The Titanic had in common is that neither should have left Southampton.”

AT Marske United, John Corner kindly hands over a copy of sports journalist Norman Giller’s autobiography. It’s his 100th book, most of the others ghost ships.

Giller’s now 77. “I was in the circulation department at the Express when he was there,” says John. “Two different people gave me a copy.”

Much of it’s about encounters with A-list celebrities. A couple of pages – warts and all, it might be said – concern an illicit encounter with a lady who was to prove equally unforgettable.

Giller consequently went to the clinic – you know, THE clinic – where he saw a young Australian medic. “Well done, mate,” said the doc, “you haven’t just got the clap, you’ve got thunderous applause.”

He never forgot the diagnosis.