DON Burluraux was a flying winger, who turned out for Middlesbrough and York City, was Darlington's player of the year in 197273 but at 24 had to retire from professional football because of injury.

He worked for ICI, helped run Redcar tourist information centre - "you'd be surprised how many people came in to ask where the toilets were" - and hosts a website about the North York Moors.

Now he's on sedentary duty.

Walks it, loves it.

Officially he is health walks co-ordinator for Middlesbrough Primary Care Trust, in reality his job is to get the Boro off its backside. It can, he diplomatically admits, be quite difficult.

"Walking is perfect exercise, " Don enthuses. "It's low impact, has little risk of injury, doesn't cost anything, needs no specialist equipment and you can do it all the year round."

On a bright February morning we join him and the Hemlington group for a brisk hour's stroll from the teeming Tees Barrage, up the Boro bank to the once-wondrous Newport Bridge and back past the Portrack Marsh nature reserve to where the walk had begun.

A notice by the lazy Lustrum Beck warns that there is to be No Shooting, thus enjoying the taddies' welfare. Another at the Barrage - no swimming, no ice skating, no digging for bait - warns that river users mustn't exceed 5mph. It's possible that we are proceeding at a slightly more leisurely pace.

Now 54, Don was a North Skelton lad, scored 14 on his debut for Staithes Juniors in the 32-1 defeat of Goldsborough - "I still don't know where they got the one from" - made his first Middlesbrough appearance in a 2-1 victory over Luton Town.

Hughie McIlmoyle scored twice for the Boro, young Malcolm Macdonald hit back for the Hatters.

He was so laid back he made Perry Como look nervous, observed the late Willie Maddren - Don's best friend and a future Boro manager.

After just five first team matches, however, a fearful ankle ligament injury - "I must have torn every ligament I had, it would have been better if I'd broken it" - effectively ended his Ayresome Park assignment.

York City signed him on loan but couldn't afford to make it permanent; the Quakers came in at a time when suddenly they'd started attracting the media.

David Frost made a programme at Feethams - "I've just put it on to DVD, " says Don - followed a year later by psychologist and self-publicist Paul Trevillion, determined to talk the Quakers out of trouble.

"It was really a load of rubbish, but the funny thing was that in the next match we beat Cambridge 6-0 and I scored the best goal I ever scored at Darlington, " he recalls.

Talking the talk and walking the walk, we recall Boro's Glaswegian goalie Willie Wigham - "deceptively agile, Stan Anderson thought he was the best signing he ever made" - running up and down Cringle Moor with Willie Maddren, treatment from Dickie Deacon, Darlington's long-serving trainer.

"The ankle was still playing up. Dickie's answer was to put it into a bucket of hot water, then alternately spray it with a hose pipe. We called it H and C, but I'm not sure how much good it did."

Riparian yarns, he also recalls a match for Whitby Town at Tow Law, in the days when Maddren briefly managed the Seasiders. Instead of the usual £7.50, Don's little brown envelope contained just fifty bob.

Willie's autobiography also recounts the incident, and how he'd approached Whitby chairman Ken Graham on his player's behalf.

"I thought he was a load of crap and that's all he deserves, " said the chairman. "I took the fiver out at half-time."

What friends are for, Willie agreed that the winger "hadn't had a particularly good game."

He got him his fiver back, though.

It was Helmington's monthly away-day, five women and a chatty 79-year-old called George who keeps himself right by walking in the mornings and tea dancing in the afternoon.

Often there are twice as many.

Don, nature lover and former champion canary breeder, loves it by the reborn river.

"I saw a seal yesterday having a salmon for its dinner and not so long ago there was a kingfisher, just a flash of blue.

"We see cormorants coming in low, long-tailed tits and blue tits and all sorts. People don't realise how attractive their doorstep now is."

It's not all best foot forward, of course. There are meetings and paper work and, for every walk, a risk assessment before the participants can be insured.

If they were thinking risk assessment, they probably shouldn't let a gephyrophobic like me across the Newport Bridge.

By the end, the mendacious pedometers reckon a mile and a half. In truth it's more like two and a half.

Thereafter he's off to lead an office workers' lunchtime walk back in the Boro - from the Bottle of Notes sculpture past the Transporter Bridge and down to the Riverside Stadium. Not, he concedes, the scenic route.

It's all part of a national scheme called the Walking Health Initiative and a government drive - the word may be inappropriate - to persuade everyone to walk for at least 30 minutes five days a week.

"It's ideal for people with coronary heart disease problems, or who've had strokes or with arthritis.

"We're not talking anything strenuous, just brisk enough to get the heart beating a bit faster. It's amazing the improvement you see.

"Walking also has mental and social benefits. There are a lot of lonely people out there."

He works Monday to Thursday, has Friday off.

So how does he spend his day off ?

"Busman's holiday, I get up on the moors and go walking."

Backtrack Briefs...

BREAD upon the waters, we wondered a couple of weeks back what had happened to the splendidly named Harry Herring - two games for Hartlepool in 1957-58.

Save for the gammy knee, he's fit and well and teaching his 11-year-old grandson how to play football properly.

"The game today is 90 per cent speed and ten per cent ability, " says Harry. "If you can pass a ball three yards you get in the England team.

"I've had six or seven operations. The pain below the knee is horrendous, but what do you expect when football's in the blood?"

Local lad, he signed for Hartlepool as a part-time professional, got into the team the following season, played ("like someone not right") with a broken toe. He was injured again, a little fish in the 50s 'Pool.

"They didn't want to know, " he says. "They just told me to go to the General Hospital and let them know what they said. I was out for two seasons.

"There was even a bit in the paper asking what had happened to me and I was stood on the terraces watching them, still a Hartlepool player."

In 1960 he was approached by West Auckland, but told by Hartlepool that he was still a professional. "It was the year they reached the Amateur Cup final, I could have played at Wembley.

"I just walked away and kept walking, totally disillusioned with professional football. They wouldn't even let me play in the Church League."

He signed for several of the semi-professional sides along the Durham coast, still lives in Hart Station. Bradley Wright, his grandson, is pretty useful, they reckon.

"He's got a good chance, " says Harry. "I just hope he doesn't make the same mistakes as me."

TIM Stahl wonders if this may be the same Harry Herring he saw at Darlington library last May talking of his wartime experiences with the RAF Gang Show. ("I was the youngest there, " says Tim. ) Since Herring of Hartlepool wasn't born until 1939, it seems unlikely. There must be shoals of them.

IN passing, as it were, Tuesday's paper briefly mentioned the death of Gordon Barker, an Essex opening batsman from 195471 - 451 first-class appearances, 22,000 runs, 36 centuries and still the county's sixth highest scorer.

It stirred memories at West Auckland v Billingham Town that evening: Gordon was West's inside left in 1953-54, while doing National Service at Catterick.

He later signed briefly for Bishop Auckland and made 57 Football League appearances for Southend.

"Just a little feller but a really clever player, " recalled West veteran Les Nevison.

Gordon married West Auckland lass Dorothy Maddison. Memory also suggests that he had a few games of cricket up at Lands and returned to these parts to become a milkman. He was 74.

OVER 40s League secretary Kip Watson reports that their "overseas" players include Lambertus Johannes Gerardus Heigmans, a Dutchman who plays football for Houghton Cricket Club. "I wouldn't like to be the referee who has to book him, " says Kip.

They don't have the problem at Brandon, where the gentleman is manager of the Arngrove Northern league side. At Brandon he's known universally as BJ.

COMPILING a second collection of old photographs of Chilton, near Ferryhill, Barry Richardson desperately seeks an image of the grandstand - and rather grand it was - at the village football ground.

Known locally as the Recreation, it was the ground where in 1923-24, Chilton reached the Amateur Cup semi-final as a Palatine League side and four years later won the Northern League at the first attempt.

"It was a huge wooden structure backing on to the road, with offices and dressing rooms beneath, " Barry recalls. "There are pictures of the team but none of the stand."

He's on 01388 720528, and will copy and return owt he's given.

And finally...

BACKTRACK readers have for once proved distinctly unStreetwise. Tuesday's column sought the only ground among the English "92" which now has "Street" in its title.

Almost everyone got it wrong, John Milburn in Chester-le-Street the first to realise it was York St, Boston - "and I had to use my reference books, " he confesses.

Several have also queried that there are only three "Lanes" on the football map.

White Hart Lane has apparently been renamed Bill Nicholson Way.

John Briggs in Darlington today invites readers to name the five former Sunderland players who manage clubs in the 92.

The famous five next week.

Published: 17/02/2006