LAST weekend I spotted a sad, but highly symbolic, sight. Thrown down in a hedgeback was a board bearing a crossed-out image of a pylon above the slogan Stop the Pylons.

The board lay forlornly in the shadow of one of the dozen or so pylons that now stamp their way along the little valley of Kirby Sigston, near Northallerton. Whatever hope inspired the board's erection had been rudely shattered. Very obviously the pylons had not been stopped.

It was to make up the number of my village cricket team, playing away at "Sigston", that I crossed the valley. Forty or so seasons ago the same fixture took me there for the first time. But for cricket it is doubtful if I would otherwise have discovered this miniature gem, just off the A19 but on the opposite, little-visited side to the North York Moors.

Yet a gem it is. Nothing spectacular. Tranquil fields, a manor house, a church, a scattering of sandstone cottages. No village to speak of. But, oh yes, the Cod Beck, glittering as it meanders between the gentlest hills on its way from Osmotherley to Thirsk. Even with the combines busy, as they were last Saturday, it is a cameo of Old England.

Or rather it was. For the National Grid has adopted it as a convenient corridor for its infamous new power line between Teesside and York. It is here that the line's brutal destructiveness appears at its very worst.

What the discarded protest notice symbolises is the ruthless sweeping aside of local feeling, which was united against the pylons. OK, there were public inquiries. Everything was done by the book. But the fact remains that, from the moment the pylons were proposed back in 1991, their erection was a certainty.

Kick and struggle as they might, local communities would be worn down and defeated in the end. And though Tony Blair's Government presided, a different government would have made no difference.

To add insult to the injury of the Sigston valley, National Grid notices now forbid fishing on the Cod Beck, overhung with the 400kv cables. In effect the Grid has stolen the river.

All pylons are an abomination. A civilised country that still counts itself among the world's wealthiest nations should now be getting rid of them, not erecting new ones. At least a country as physically small as Britain should be.

Appalled by the Sigston pylons, I read the next day that Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows had been rewritten for Blair's Britain. The brainchild of a landscape photographer named Gareth Lovett Jones, the new version is entitled The Wind in the Pylons.

Arguments rage about the setting of the original The Wind in the Willows. Based in Gloucestershire, Mr Jones probably didn't have the Kirby Sigston valley in mind for his updated version. But no more telling setting could be found. And while the National Grid is the immediate villain, the true culprit is the mockery of democracy that allows big battalions to ride roughshod over local opinion. And worst of all is that governments elected in the name of the people uphold this sham.

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