THIRTY-seven years ago this week, day four of a wet-eared journey into journalism, they sent me to Lartington Hall, a vast and crumbling 45-roomed mansion in which an elderly widow called Olive Field lived effectively alone.

She was rich, eccentric and had a remarkably deep voice, as if it had been summoned via one of the many servants' bell ropes from some distant part of the pile.

You remember how poor, petrified Pip is required - in Great Expectations - to entertain Miss Haversham? It was all a bit like that.

Lartington's in Teesdale, a few miles west of Barnard Castle. After Mrs Field's death, the hall stood empty and unwanted for six years until the arrival of Robin Rackham, a council house lad from South Shields.

Robin had become an airline pilot, bought a house in Romaldkirk - two villages up the dale - formed the Teesdale Buildings Preservation Trust in 1976, tangled (and by no means alone in that) with a council planning officer called Michael Pease and, finding no one rash enough to take on Lartington Hall, vowed to preserve it himself.

"Only a fool would do it," advised Frank Stephenson, his solicitor. He was given the keys, though hardly a present, on Boxing Day 1979.

Robin's autobiography, just published, is called Defining Moment and is chiefly about his airborne exploits. It could as easily have been called By the Seat of My Pants, though some other flier may have thought of it first.

There's the story of how he was ejected from the USAF, how a fitter who went for lunch and forgot to finish the job almost cost the lives of 200 passengers and of the holiday flight co-pilot from Newcastle still drunk after a bottle of brandy the night before.

"Poor Sven," recalls Robin, retired at 64. "He had to go into a clinic after that."

Both his father and grandfather, curiously, were pilots for the Port of Tyne, his grandfather one of 19 killed when the pilot cutter hit a Tyne estuary mine in 1916.

Young Robin was sent - "dumped" - to a cheerless boarding school at Whitworth, near Spennymoor then back, little more joyfully, to Shields. "For me South Shields will always be remembered as a dreary and a lonely place," he concedes.

His parents emigrated to America, where he joined the USAF until getting into a pretty fearsome tail spin and then flew commercially for ten companies, only one of which is still in the air.

"Most have gone bust so I can say what I want," he says. "There's no glamour to being a pilot, the working conditions are horrendous. Some of the low cost carriers just drive you into the ground and you'll be hearing the pips squeak. I'm very glad to be out of it.

"What other profession places two men in a dehydrated aluminium tube for endless hours and with little respite from the boredom save for the odd call of nature." The routine, of course, is now steered by computer.

Back to earth, he and his wife Claire have spent £400,000 of their own money and rather more of English Heritage's on restoring the 400-year-old, Grade II* listed building.

Re-roofing alone took three years. The ballroom is now a recording studio, the chapel houses a squash court (to Mr Pease's considerable chagrin) and the garden ("a veritable jungle") has been wondrously restored by Mrs Rackham.

The family lives in the former servants wing, the rest of the hall is let to large groups for weekend breaks. "We almost went bankrupt through it but now the work is 95 per cent done," he says.

"I'm not sure that Mrs Field would recognise the place, but I hope that she would approve."

Defining Moment, an engaging and eye opening account of life on the wing, is published by Lartington Music and Media, Lartington, Barnard Castle, Co Durham DL12 9BW and is also available from Ottakars in Darlington - £9, plus £1.70 postage.

OLIVE Field lived out her days at Lartington Hall with several quaintly-named and generally ill-behaved dogs, a butler called Lancaster and a one-eyed, 50-year-old parrot called Horrocks.

"She swore like a trooper," recalls Robin Rackham, a reference not to Horrocks, but to his owner.

The parrot didn't talk but sometimes blathered, Mrs Field once said. Unlike Olive Field, Horrocks also liked to slide down the bannister first thing in the morning. Though the hall deteriorated rapidly after her husband's death in 1957, it was also used by Yorkshire Television in the early 1970s as the setting for a "tenants' dinner" in the celebrated film about Hannah Hauxwell.

"The television people have arrived, Madam," announced Lancaster.

"Well tell them to fix the bloody thing," said Mrs Field.

She'd been born in Ireland, one of 12, her father a former aide-de-camp to General Robert E Lee.

She met Norman Field on Lord Vesty's yacht, lived from 1908 to 1918 in Morris Grange, near Scotch Corner, which the family gave subsequently to be a home for tubercular children from Middlesbrough.

Norman Field, his family American department store owners, had been educated at Eton, became master of the college beagles, bought the nearby Streatlam castle and estate as well as Lartington and bred the Derby winner Enfield.

His wife spent 27 years as Master of Lartington Harriers, had many years service on North Riding and Startforth councils - sometimes mildly miffed when staff declined to be tipped for their trouble - was chairman of Greta Bridge magistrates and gave much time and money to her charities.

"I do frighten people, I think it's my deep voice," she once told the column. "People who know me don't take any notice."

She was also known for her enormous cars - and for sometimes making rude gestures from the back of them - but during wartime petrol rationing was spied riding a bike through the village.

"Come here quick, mum. See what Hitler's done to Mrs Field," a Teesdale urchin infamously observed.

The hall, a Red Cross convalescent home during the war, was itself in need of much care and attention thereafter. In the cellar, Robin Rackham even found a 1920s tin of truffles and a Fortnum and Mason cake of the same vintage.

Mrs Field left the hall to the Disabled Drivers Association, another of her favoured causes, who took a look and gave it back again.

We'd met her again in 1971 - "Don't make me out to be a silly ass," she instructed - when she admitted that the locals seemed to quite like her.

It was rather odd of them, she added.

She, her driver and her nurse were killed in a road accident in Coniscliffe Road, Darlington in 1973. The extraordinary Mrs Field was 87.

STRAWS in the wind, perhaps, but on the weekend that the Sunday Times reported that an action group called Motorists Action Detection - MAD, for short - has been sabotaging speed cameras, the Darlington & Stockton Times noted something rather similar.

The MAD men, said to have a cell in Newcastle, are reportedly furious at the growth in speed camera cops and at their expected trebling by 2004.

In the quiet North Yorkshire village of Thornton-le-Beans, meanwhile, the annual scarecrow competition has been nobbled.

Judith Renton, third last year with Jack and the Beanstalk, has had her offering removed, damaged and dumped unceremoniously at the far end of the village.

The effigy was of a polliss with a speed gun.

FROM Sunday Times to D&S Times to Church Times, where much of this week's correspondence columns is filled with retorts to a priestly letter the previous week.

"Silly generalisation and trivialisation", "quite the opposite of the truth" - that sort of thing.

Though it was the first issue since the Church's fourth most senior cleric announced his retirement on Test Match Special, the Bishop of Durham warrants not so much as a mention.

Readers, of course, will already have guessed the identity of the priest amid the turbulence. He is the Rev Dr Peter Mullen.