FOUNDED in 1895, the National Trust took 75 years - to 1970 - to gain a membership of just 200,000. But over the following ten years it added 800,000 to reach a million. That number doubled over the next decade, and the three million mark was passed in 2002. Membership is now rising faster than ever. In its last year - to February 2003 - the Trust attracted an amazing 500,875 new members.

More than that. People are pouring into Trust properties in what the annual report, just out, terms "unprecedented" numbers. A demanding target of 11.2 million visits was surpassed by more than a million.

What is the secret of this spectacular success? Well, for those with a taste for the Trust's attractions, membership is astonishingly good value. Through the pensioners' concessionary rate, my wife and I are "into pocket", as it were, simply with the three or four visits we make each year to Fountains Abbey. Our other numerous NT visits are a bonus.

Not that the Trust is without fault. The lowered blinds in its country houses are infuriating. In house and garden it sticks too slavishly to historical purity: the NT is no place for a creative mind. And there is occasional crassness, like turning part of the Fountains Abbey visitor centre over to offices, whose window shields look like down-town boarding up.

But the Trust does magnificent work. In my view its finest achievement is Enterprise Neptune, launched in 1965 and now safeguarding hundreds of miles of coastline. Once derided as Ruritanian, the Trust's environmentally-friendly farming now offers a model for the wider countryside. And of course, for all its museum tendency, the Trust has saved many precious buildings.

Which brings us back to the point: why such a success? Surely what it signals is that in an ever-more squalid Britain there is a deep yearning for what is unspoilt and speaks of our roots. Certainly, more than a century after the Trust was created, the value of the aim simply stated by its founders- "for places of historic interest and natural beauty" - remains as high as ever.

The message of that soaring membership and "unprecedented" visitor surge is that we should be taking greater care of Britain as a whole. The National Trust's membership far exceeds that of all Britain's political parties put together. And that must be saying something.

SHORTLY after writing here about the power line that has brutalised the gentle Cotcliffe valley at Kirby Sigston, near Northallerton, I read in Countryside Focus, the official magazine of the Government's Countryside Agency, of the Countryside Character Network, a CA initiative to establish "what gives a locality its own sense of place, what makes it different... and what conditions should be set for any new development or change".

The Network is seeking case studies. Well, an examination of the Cotcliffe valley might be instructive - if embarrassing. Where was the Countryside Agency - aim "working for people and places in rural England" - when the National Grid obliterated this small valley's very distinct and precious "sense of place"?

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