THE opening of the Pennine Way, the battle over off-roading in the Yorkshire Dales, the clean-up of the Durham Coast – three items of particular North-East interest in this absorbing anthology of writings and reports on the countryside from The Guardian newspaper.

In 1963 Sid Chaplin, not instantly identified with “the countryside”, put in a strong plea for rural life: “It needs stressing again that the country is a sight more than a ‘lung’ for the urban dweller. It is a land with people, problems and values. All are in danger.” But he opened his essay by reporting the dismantling of a George Stephenson beam engine, to be re-erected in “an open air museum of folk ways, buildings, tools and machines, just over the hill from Durham Cathedral”: Beamish.

If the anthology has a fault, it is that it leans too much towards conservation and leisure. But the farmer’s voice is heard. One complains: “Farmers feel insulted by environmentalists.

The Council for the Protection of Rural England’s latest publication, Future Harvests, demonstrates this well. Being all about the future of agriculture, the research failed to consult a single working farmer.” Humour is not neglected: TV critic Nancy Banks- Smith reviews a David Bellamy programme on the medicinal power of plants: “I am trying ginko, which improveth the memory. Or it would do if I didn’t keep forgetting to take it.’’