RSGOLD-RUNESCAPEGOLD

Mr Gummer has professed his belief that small-town centres should be protected - but has he the power or the guts to put words into practice?The centre of Cirencester is still amazingly intact. Opposition to the Gloucestershire County Council's draft structure plan proved so virulent that the document has been withdrawn. Some 1,600 letters of objection forced the planners to acknowledge that their ideas were highly unpopular, and now, for the first time, they are about to make an attempt to gauge grass-roots feeling.Meanwhile, the most acute local threat is to Cirencester, which is anxiously awaiting a decision by the Environment Minister, John Gummer, on whether or not he will sanction the creation of two non-food retail parks on the outskirts of the town. Privately commissioned research has shown that last year the figure was below 2,000, and that, at this rate, only 41,000 new houses may suffice.The burning question is, how can local planners, who are goaded by developers offering fortunes for building land, be made to acknowledge such truths? With great difficulty, is the short answer Yet one gleam of light has recently appeared. Moreover, it is only one among hundreds of rural settlements threatened by house-building on a monstrous scale - because the Government has decreed that Gloucestershire must find room for 53,000 new houses by the year 2011.Is there any real need for so many new dwellings? Detailed investigation suggests that the figures from the Department of the Environment are seriously flawed.

The numbers are merely a projection of trends between 1971 and 1993, and depend heavily on the fact that, during those years, annual migration into the county averaged 2,700. Almost as bad, every 12 hours the B-road which cuts through the edge of the village carries 400 lorries, many of them heading across country to evade the Severn bridges, whose crazy toll system permits drivers to cross free in a westerly direction, and to pay only when they come east. Highnam, in other words, though judged the best-kept large village in the county, is on the point of being wrecked by inadequate planning controls. Yet at Highnam, between Gloucester and Newent, I was outraged to hear that the village is under severe pressure from the County Council to accommodate dozens, if not hundreds, of new houses, in developments that would wreck the admirably balanced environment created by hard work and imagination. Earlier this year I described my efforts to judge the finals of Gloucestershire's best-kept village competition, the Bledisloe Cup. Well, last weekend I went round with a small official party presenting the prizes, to Highnam, Oddington and Cherington, winners in the large, medium and small divisions It was a fine, windy day, with everyone in good spirits.

For More details contact The Society of Ploughmen, 01302 852469. 20 October: Brigg, Lincolnshire; Dumfries; Chesterfield, Derbyshire; 26 October: Deeping St Nicholas, Peterborough; Alton, Hampshire 2 Novembe: Wakefield, W Yorkshire. 3 November: Wetherby, N Yorkshire; 9 November: Rotherham, S Yorkshire; 30 November: Montrose, Aberdeenshire. 19 October: Liskeard, Cornwall; East Grinstead, W Sussex; Tetbury, Gloucestershire 19-20 October: Alnwick, Northumberland. No wonder, either, as Stan Hill reminds us, that he and his sort could only feed a beleagured nation with the help of plenty of mechanisation.Sometime in the late Seventies, many of the older ploughmen realised they were missing the old ways, and began the current vogue for vintage ploughing.