AFTER all these years of gathering in ale-infused clubhouses, the Northern League annual meeting scaled vertically upmarket last Saturday. It was held in the guest hall at Alnwick Castle, ancestral home of the Dukes of Northumberland – the Percy family – and, more recently, of Harry Potter.

Little evidence of sporting activity appears among the Percy folk, though the Duchess was an eight-out-of-ten figure skater in her Scottish youth and Lady Melissa, one of their daughters, is recorded as a tennis player.

Local legend has it that one of the sons also played outside left for Alnwick Town in Northern Alliance days, inclusion owing more to lineage than lightning speed, though long-serving Town secretary Cyril Cox struggled when asked the lad’s name.

“Bugger me, I can’t remember,” said Cyril, prompting the perhaps ignoble response that Bugger-me-I-can’t-remember was a funny name, even for the son of a duke.

It was a very good day, though.

IN order comfortably to make the 11am start, it’s necessary to catch the 7 09 train from Darlington to Alnmouth, affording a blessed hour with the morning papers. Thus is it possible to report one of history’s great corrections, from The Times. A picture the previous day of Lord Prescott had wrongly identified the former Labour deputy leader as Clint Eastwood. “We apologise to both,” said The Times, though one may have been more offended than the other.

By Monday a further letter appeared from retired judge Barrington Black, whose name had once appeared beneath a picture of Cary Grant. “You only apologised to him,” he said.

THE Daily Mail had a full page on Saturday evening’s Greyhound Derby – run at Towcester, £175,000 for the winner – in which Droopys Verve, the favourite, was trained (of all the blessed places in the kingdom) at Alnwick.

The piece also recalled Winston Churchill’s view, in 1928, that greyhound racing was nothing more than animated roulette.

Back then, London alone had 33 registered tracks, up to 70,000 in the traps at the White City. Now the capital has none. Including Newcastle and Sunderland, Britain has just 22.

Droopys Verve, owned by North-East businessman Neil Conlon and trained by Angela Harrison, had won 11 of its 15 races and been second in the others.

In Saturday night’s final it started at 7-4, was beaten by arch-rival Dorotas Wildcat but still won £25,000 in second place. They probably don’t pay out as much as that at Wheatley Hill.

ALNWICK’S a slightly hairy four-mile walk from Alnmouth station, along a road without pavements. Restoration of the branch railway between the two, closed 50 years ago and lifted soon afterwards, proceeds imperceptibly.

In Alnwick we take breakfast at Barter Books, wondrously outspread in the former railway station and said by New Statesman magazine to be “the British Library among second hand bookshops.”

It was opened in 1992 by Mary and Stuart Manley – he a former toy shop assistant from Stockton, she from Missouri – who’d met on a transatlantic flight after he’d thrown across a note reading “Put your hand up if you want to talk to me.”

She put her hand up.

Barter Books – “in the face of a rather large overdraft” – was her brainchild. “One day someone’s going to find you dead beneath a pile of ideas,” a friend once told her.

Its range is huge, its approach informal, its overhead railway renowned. Winnie has a shelf all to himself, though whether it includes his thoughts on dog racing it was impossible to glean.

Quotations of what used to be termed an improving nature are painted, prominently. So are the words of Jerusalem and Tennyson’s hope for no moaning at the bar when he puts out to sea.

A lifesize cardboard cut-out of the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk stands by the loos, the reasons for such location uncertain.

Sports books range from Lord Tollemache’s thoughts on croquet (£250) to Lion Hunting in South-West Abyssinia (£180), for which there may be little demand on the less sanguine shores of north Northumberland.

A History of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club (1756-1900) is £460.

Ghosted football autobiographies stretch from Alan Ball to Dwight Yorke, ten-a-penny bit mostly £7 60. For some reason the Northern League’s 125th anniversary history appeared not to be on display, but I’ve any amount of copies for three quid.

BREAKFAST options include something styled Spike Milligan’s Favourite, basically egg and chips on toast. How came it by its name? “It must have been Spike Milligan’s favourite,” says the lass behind the counter. Clearly she’s been reading up.

ALNWICK styles itself The Modern Medieval Town, the 1,000-year-old castle – and more recently its gardens – the jewel in the ducal crown.

Their growth was the duchess’s idea – the Versailles of the North, she promised – though not all thought everything rosy. A 2003 piece in The Observer loved the duchess but thought the garden volunteers better suited to running an allotment.

By 10 30 on Saturday morning it all seems pretty busy and greatly friendly, lists of future attractions ranging from “gorillas” to “granny tourismo”

Inexplicably, there’s no mention of the Ebac Northern League’s annual meeting, an event sponsored by Specsavers – at least I think that’s what it said – and attended by clubs from across the North-East.

Some report seeing “Free Tommy” signs lining the A1. Perhaps they meant the statue on Seaham front, perhaps the recently incarcerated gentleman from the rabid right.

The meeting’s in the guest hall, the minstrels gallery silent, the room hung with portraits of the nobility. League chairman Glenn Youngman’s slightly distracted because his ninth grandchild had been born a couple of hours earlier and the eighth three days before that. “Just two more for a team,” says Glenn.

Some seemed scumfished, memories of the annual meeting a few years earlier – at Tow Law, of all the sunblessed spots – which had been switched outside onto the pitch because it was so hot.

League secretary Kevin Hewitt, somehow having kept his head above water during a rainy season which required champions elect Marske United to play 18 games in the final six weeks, was just glad it had stopped.

“In an era where professional players complain that they’re mentally and physically exhausted if asked to play twice in less than seven days, to have that kind of demand placed on players who also have to work is above and beyond what should be expected,” he wrote in his annual report.

Marske and Morpeth Town, runners-up, are compulsorily promoted under FA rules to a league that stretches to Peterborough and Wisbech. “Unfortunately,” added Kevin “this will do little to help the UK government reach its target for greenhouse gas emissions.”

Nothing else much happened. After a close season barely long enough to allow the pitch to be cut, it all kicks off again on August 4. Next season’s annual meeting is at Guisborough.