ONE of Britain's leading conservationists has dismissed calls to return the Lindisfarne Gospels to the North-East.

Simon Watney, conservation cases recorder for the Church Monuments Society, in London, wrote in Saturday's Times that the Gospels should remain in the capital's British Library.

He was responding to the Northumbrian Association's campaign for the Gospels to be returned to Durham Cathedral or Holy Island - and said the campaign was based on "sentimental, narrow regionalism".

The issue was recently debated in the House of Commons, but the British Library, which has the final decision, has consistently refused to hand over the Gospels.

Mr Watney said: "The Gospels do not belong to the North-East, but to the nation and to the world. In the British Library they are safe.

"Doubtless well-intended, the campaign to remove the Gospels from London promotes an essentially sentimental and narrow regionalism.

"I wonder what its supporters would say to a Kent MP who wanted to return the manuscript of Charles Dickens's Barnaby Rudge to Broadstairs, where it was partly written in order to bolster the area?"

The Gospels were written in 8th Century Northumberland, which stretched from Yorkshire deep into modern-day Scotland, and was for a time the most powerful British nation and produced some of Europe's leading intellectuals, including the Venerable Bede.

The Gospels were held at Holy Island but were moved to Durham Cathedral in 1104. Eventually, King Henry VIII took them to London in 1537.

Nearly 200,000 North-Easterners flocked to see the Gospels when they spent three months in Newcastle's Laing Art Gallery, in 2000.