About two miles into a walk high on the North York Moors last weekend I came upon a pack of beagles.

Three or four smartly-attired huntsmen stood at strategic points on the open moor. A pack of hounds forayed in two groups. And scattered here and there were a dozen or so supporters.

Mercifully unseen, that quarry was, of course, a hare. Like all others of its kind, it would pose little threat to man or beast. Especially among square miles of heather. Rather, the hare, the species, is a delight of our countryside.

Instantly my legs, still capable of carrying me without complaint over a dozen or so rough moorland miles, felt like jelly.

Politely, perhaps even pleasantly, I exchanged the time of day with a couple of the huntsmen and three or four of the supporters. Like most hunting folk they are, I am sure, thoroughly decent citizens.

So my private thought wasn't the hate-filled phrase that would have sprung into the minds of the most dedicated/fanatical anti-hunt campaigners/saboteurs (take your pick): "The bastards." It was: "How can they?"

But, Tony Blair, please listen: this must be stopped.

BY now, some lucky reader of The Northern Echo will have won the copy of John Betjeman's Collected Poems given as a prize to mark National Poetry Day, which celebrated Britain, particularly its landscapes.

The Betjeman poem always quoted in this context is Slough, with its injunction: "Come friendly bombs... '' But Betjeman captured the essence of many places.

Though with a dud opening, his Lake District concludes with lines that will resonate with many as much as anything by Wordsworth:

Long hiking holidays will yet provide

Long stony lanes and back at six to tea

And Heinz's ketchup on the tablecloth.

Still, this poem was lucky to feature in Essential Poems for Britain, BBC2's Poetry Day salute. And more puzzling was the choice of Ursula Fanthorpe's Atlas, a wonderful love poem, drawing parallels with WD40, but not specially to do with Britain.

Yet Fanthorpe (born 1929) has written one of the best poems about our contemporary landscape. The response to a road scheme for Romney Marsh, it contrasts the marsh's distinctive character - "salt, solitude, strangeness... sky over sky after sky...'' with its fate: "It wants hard shoulders, Happy Eaters... It wants Kwiksaves, Artics, Ind Est, Jnctns.''

There's more, all equally spot-on. And add a wind farm or six and a bestriding line of pylons, and you have the Beautiful Britain we are feverishly making.