THOUGH the Van Dycks may have to go and the Bechstein grand be pawned, sang Noel Coward, we'll stand by the stately homes of England. Well, yes, by and large we as a nation, or more often a few immensely rich individuals, have stood by the really stately ones, the Raby Castles, the Wynyard Parks and the Castle Howards.

But the once-magnificent stock of large country houses, the centuries-old homes of the landed classes, has been decimated. All of us, however our own housing status compares to Coward's suburban-semi origins, are culturally diminished by the culling process which began in earmest in the middle of the last century and continues today.

That is why the saving of Kiplin Hall, the Jacobean manor house near Scorton, Richmond, whose gables and domed towers resonate with Anglo-American history, is so heartening. The ceremony there at the weekend, the unveiling of a portrait of Kiplin's first owner, the founder of the American state of Maryland, presages reopening to the public in July.

Although Kiplin is listed grade-I, the "protection" afforded our most important architectural and historic treasures, officialdom has often turned a blind eye to its fate. Only the dedication and courage of the hall's last private owner, the late Bridget Talbot, ensured that there was something left to save by the time a lottery heritage grant was made in 1998.

Since then, some £500,000 has been spent on renovation, not least on the hall's first central heating system in its 380 years. The lottery gave more than two-thirds of the money and there has been much hard work by the trustees to raise the rest, including some from American sources cultivated by Miss Talbot since the 1930s. When the trustees, headed by Mark Chetwynd-Talbot, of Coxwold, Thirsk, say £2m more would be needed for a complete restoration, the scale of the challenge involving similarly threatened piles all over the country becomes clear.

That the effort should be made to save as much as possible of this dwindling sector of the heritage is reinforced by looking at some significant losses in the Kiplin area alone. Halnaby Hall, Croft, where Byron spent part of his honeymoon with his Milbanke in-laws, and its neighbour Clervaux Castle, the Chaytors' family seat of many towers (some of whose stones were used to build something more modest at Dalton-on-Tees for a local bus company's boss), were both economic casualties in the mid-20th century. Hutton Bonville Hall, nearer Northallerton, owned by the Beresford-Peirses, went in 1964. In County Durham, it is sad that Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Coxhoe Hall did not survive beyond 1952 as a literary shrine.

Yet these days there are so many possible reincarnations for these great houses, even if official protectors of the public interest declare them unviable as living museums - as was the case when the National Trust declined Miss Talbot's offer of an unendowed Kiplin. The Yorkshire examples above are in the constituency of one William Hague, who has an apartment in the imaginative conversion which builders Yuill made of the splendid Brough Hall, Catterick, after the death of Sir William Lawson.

When Lord Crathorne, coincidentally patron of the Kiplin venture, moved out of the fine country house built near Yarm by his Edwardian ancestor, it became Richard Branson's Crathorne Hall hotel.

It would be unreasonable to expect the lottery to pick up the bill for every distressed home for the gentry, but it would make sense for it, or some other public source, to fund a pool of expertise to advise on viable alternatives to the bulldozers.