THERE is much joy in the Save The Countryside camp. The so-called "Gummer's Clause" has been torn up. Remember John Gummer, an owlish-looking acolyte of Margaret Thatcher, who survived into John Major's Cabinet? What might bring him to mind is the old gossip column story that he had pillows on his bed embroidered with the word YES.

Less salaciously, as John Major's Environment Secretary, Gummer relaxed the planning laws to allow large houses to be built in the countryside. Now, to the delight of the Council for the Protection of Rural England, the Government has scrapped this arrangement.

But in truth Gummer's Clause has never been the bete noir it has been painted. Gummer introduced it to revive what had been a distinctive tradition of country-house building. No less a lover of our countryside and best buildings than John Betjeman averred that the country house in its landscape setting was among Britain's gifts to Western culture.

Gummer's Clause allowed houses judged to be of high merit, in an appropriate setting, to be built in breach of the usual ban on building in open countryside. Far from opening floodgates it has led to the building of just ten homes, from 50 applied for.

As a threat to the English countryside, Gummer's Clause is a red herring. Far more damaging is the loophole that often allows the buyer of a small piece of land to build a house on it, purportedly in support of an an agricultural or horticultural business. In my area alone five or six houses have appeared in open countryside through this loophole. Over Britain as a whole the ragged effect of these haphazard exemptions, which stem from concessions to farming back in the 1950s, is considerable. Indeed, apart perhaps from getting rid of overhead power lines, there are few measures that would now do more to preserve the integrity of the countryside than halting this particular abuse of the planning system.

And by the way, another Gummer's Clause put the block on out-of-town retail parks. Poor old Gummer is unjustly berated.

TEMPORARILY stored in a council depot, Whitby's recently-replaced whalebones are to be displayed - flat - in the town's popular Archives Centre. Welcome though this local retention of the bones is, their future would have been more strikingly safeguarded under a suggestion by the man who obtained them, former Whitby rural area surveyor Graham Leach. He proposed that the famous arch should be re-erected in a planned extension to the Pannet Park museum, running through two stories of the building. Alas, this imaginative idea appears to have been overlooked.

EIGHT years in the making. £6m spent. The Hadrian's Wall Trail is up and walking. Don't ask the cost of what will remain Britain's most popular long-distance walk - Wainwright's Coast to Coast. Having spotted the possibility of a cross-country walk linking three national parks, Wainwright did it and put it in a book. No committees. No reports. And the top Countryside Johnnies are still seething - which explains why Wainwright's great walk is still not officially recognised.

www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk/ features