THERE must have been gangs of them on every street corner. Men in plus-fours perched high on the top of giant penny farthings, grooming their long handlebar moustaches and causing such a nuisance to the passers-by beneath that Sir Robert Peel's government had to rush through legislation to crackdown on their menace.

Or so my sad mind thought on reading this week's news that Darlington police are to invoke the 1835 Highways Act to keep cyclists off the pavements.

Unfortunately, there's a spoke in this historical wheel of fancy - not even the penny farthing had been invented, letalone the bicycle, when the 1835 Act was passed. It needs explaining...

Bicycling history begins in 1817 when Baron von Drais invented a walking machine known as a "hobby horse". It was two wheels joined by a crossbar. He balanced his baronial bottom on the bar, pushed with his feet on the ground and rolled speedily around his estate.

In 1865, Frenchman Ernest Michaux attached pedals to the front wheel. This was a "velocipede" - "fast foot" - but was known as the "boneshaker" as it was wooden and Victorian roads were as pockmarked as the Somme.

Over the next five years, the size of the front wheel grew so the rider could travel further with a single rotation of the pedals. Soon he was sitting 5ft above the ground - and "taking a header" whenever the front wheel of his penny farthing got stuck in a pot-hole and he was chucked on to the road.

But still there were no gangs of penny farthingists hanging out on street corners - these were exclusive machines costing six months' average pay. Only the very fashionable penny farthing-ed.

The bike was revolutionised around 1885 when the pedals were attached by a chain to the rear wheel and both wheels became the same size; it was refined in 1898 when an Irish vet called John Boyd Dunlop made it comfortable for his son by adding pneumatic tyres.

These late 19th century developments had massive social ramifications. They ended the bustle and corset era and heralded the sleek 1920s look as every woman wanted clothes suitable for cycling.

It meant that man had developed a machine which could carry him further than a horse in a day, and which allowed ordinary townspeople to ride out into the countryside, much to the delight of rural shopkeepers and innkeepers who laid on refreshments.

And it meant that now there were bikes regularly being pedalled on pavements. In 1888, the authorities looked to their law books to stamp out the practice. They found Section 72 of the 1835 Highways Act. The Act said a person was guilty of an offence if he "shall wilfully ride upon any footpath or causeway by the side of any road made or set apart for the use or accommodation of foot passengers; or shall wilfully lead or drive any horse, ass, sheep, mule, swine or cattle or carriage of any description, or any truck or sledge, upon any such footpath, or causeway".

There were, though, loopholes: there is no mention of the uninvented bike.

So Section 85 of the 1888 Local Government Act extended the definition of "carriage" to include "bicycles, tricycles, velocipedes and other similar machines". It is, in effect, this Act which Darlington police are promising to use - which is of great relief to those of us baffled by the thought of something being banned before it had been invented.