HAS Jeremy Clarkson been driven round the bend? Why did he allow himself to be associated with Honda's spurious survey into Britain's favourite roads? Doesn't he ever get out?

The survey appeared in Saturday's paper. Buttertubs Pass - laughably claimed by Clarkson to be "England's only truly spectacular road" - was in first place, the lovely route between Penrith and the Tyne Valley second, Gateshead's wild western bypass third and, yet more ludicrously, the flat, fat A19 between Thirsk and York in seventh.

Just one Welsh road was in the top ten and only one in Scotland, some lowland leisure route near Langholm. Perhaps no one's traversed Rannoch Moor, or through the glowerings of Glencoe.

The survey could almost have been editionised.

On Saturday, coincidentally, we headed for the Lake District, had breakfast in Middleton-in-Teesdale, headed on the beautiful back road to Brough over Mickleton Moor and past Selset Reservoir.

Warnings, painted on numerous car tyres and fixed to posts, warned to "Beware of lambs", as if suddenly they were armed and extremely dangerous and not, like Samson, shorn.

It wasn't as breathtaking as Buttertubs Pass. But as the arid A19?

The journey ended at St Bees, western extremity of the Coast to Coast Walk, named after St Bega who is said to have landed from Ireland, begged the local baron for land upon which to build a nunnery and contemptuously been told that she could have as much as was snow covered the following day.

The next day was Midsummer's Day. It snowed.

Thereafter to the Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway, historically and affectionately known as the Ratty, and back across Hardknott Pass and Wrynose Pass. Incredibly spectacular and hugely dangerous, both make the breathtaking Buttertubs resemble Eldon Bank by comparison and the A19 and western bypass merely the congenitally blocked arteries they are.

Kirkstone Pass, even the maligned A66 over Stainmore, are infinitely more alluring than those. With its top ten, alas, Honda is simply on the road to ridicule.

UP to its oxters as usual, last week's column attempted to track the story of how Donna Douglas - the Louisiana blonde who played Elly May Clampett in the Beverly Hillbillies - had 40 years ago to be rescued from a North Yorkshire snow drift.

The first indication that something was in turn adrift came from Cathie Jackson in Darlington. "That photograph you used," she wrote, "wasn't it Donna Douglas the singer?"

"Aren't they one and the same?" we replied, and certainly there was a marked resemblance.

The mystery has been resolved, however, by one of those rabbit-out-of-the hat tricks at which Gadfly readers are so wondrously adept.

C Coldberg, who offers no further details but merits abundant thanks, sends the programme from the 1962 Sunderland Empire pantomime Cinderella, starring Karen Greer - who'd appeared with Tex Ritter at Harringay Arena - Rita Burton, Grande and Mars as the Ugly Sisters and Donna Douglas as Cinders.

Donna, said in the programme to be 18, was Irish. She'd come third in the Eurovision song contest with Message in a Bottle, toured with Eddie Calvert and appeared at the Earls Court Radio Exhibition.

Empire tickets ranged from three to eight shillings; three course lunch was five bob.

Mr Coldberg had been taken to the pantomime just after Christmas. Donna Douglas, he recalls, missed the performance after being trapped in a snow storm - "but I thought it was in Scotland."

Thus armed, we have found the story. Donna - aged 20, the Echo reported - was in hospital after being found in a car buried beneath a snow drift at Carter Bar, on the Scottish border.

Susannah Vernon, the 19-year-old fairy godmother, had suddenly to be turned into Cinderella. Maureen Purdy, the witch, had a spell as fairy godmother. Miss Vernon was terrified, anyway.

"Donna does several songs. The only place I sing is in the bath," she said.

The show went on; the audience loved it. Donna Douglas, colleen, spent several more days thawing out in Jedburgh hospital before living happily ever after. Elly May Clampett was probably getting the sun in Beverly Hills.

CALAMITOUSLY coincidental, Janet McCrickard in Darlington claims a case of mistaken identity in the other image which illustrated last week's column.

It purported to be the Venerable Bede, Jarrow lad, and showed him clutching a rosary. Janet not only claims it to be St Dominic, who lived 400 years later, but is willing to put a fiver on it.

Catholic doctrine, she says, is that Dominic received the first rosary in a vision from the Blessed Virgin Mary. "It's so easy to confuse saints," she adds, comfortingly, "the Daily Mail does it all the time."

We consulted the Oxford Dictionary of Saints. Artists have depicted Dominic with a rosary, it says - "which devotion he is erroneously believed to have invented."

It doesn't necessarily mean that Janet's lost her fiver, but she'd best find the worry beads, nonetheless.

WE may also be grateful to the Stokesley Stockbroker who recalls that Bede was constantly picked upon and bullied at school. "Indeed for many years throughout South Shields," adds the Stockbroker, "he was known as the Vulnerable Bede."

A NOTE from Tom Dobbin in Durham: "Why not run the occasional piece on headlines which don't quite stir the blood," he suggests, and returns one from this very paper. "The last word in suspended ceilings," it says.

It is immediately topped, however - as well a suspended ceiling might be - by a headline spotted by David Walsh from Redcar on the front page of last Wednesday's Evening Gazette.

"Bones shock in old graveyard," it said.

GETTING on two-and-a-half years ago, several of these columns flirted with the mondegreen party - the accepted name for a misheard song lyric.

Young innocents, mondegreen as the grass, carol every Christmas the lyric "Round John virgin, mother and child."; older folk and Beatles fans sing not of the girl with kaleidoscope eyes - Lucy, by name - but that the girl with colitis goes by.

Monday's Independent talked of mondegreens, too. The term had just been coined, they said, by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll.

Rob Williams in Newcastle cheerfully recalls the Gadfly references. "The rest of the world," he says, "really must keep up."

So with continuing thanks to all who make these things possible, that's it for another seven days. Next week, who knows, we may even rediscover the whereabouts of the singer in the snow drift. In the meantime, we head along what is truly Britain's favourite road. It leads, rejoicing, home.

Published: ??/??/2003