THE steady erosion of the services provided by the Royal Mail and the Post Office in rural areas continues inexorably.

Pilot schemes proposed for Leeming Bar, Crakehall and North Stainley - under which opening hours are slashed - look like becoming the norm in smaller villages. With benefits transactions having been mostly removed from post offices, there simply isn't the business to justify the payments made to staff to man them.

This is not an exclusively rural issue, as suburban post offices are affected too, but it is country areas which will feel the effects most. When you have precious few public services of this nature to start with, it hurts more.

Inevitably, we will see more of those odd village "marriages". Post offices have set up in pubs, churches and residential front rooms in recent years and in this proposal, the ticket office of the Wensleydale railway at Leeming Bar is where villagers will be able to do their post office business, if only for eight hours a week.

It is a similar story in upper Wensleydale where the Sunday franked mail collection has been withdrawn by the Royal Mail from a local business. The economics of the decision are beyond dispute but nevertheless it makes trade harder in a part of the country where businesses generally don't have much going for them.

What should rural communities do? Fighting to retain these postal services can only make sense if some sort of business case can be made in addition to the undoubted community service benefits. It is no point demanding that the local post office stays open for 40 hours a week if the postmaster/mistress spends 30 of those hours twiddling his or her thumb. Credibility will be undermined if villagers man the barricades to protect services they simply don't use.