Country diary: The silver lining to Dr Beeching's axe | Phil Gates

Romaldkirk, Teesdale: Here at a former railway route, the air is thick with meadowsweet blossom, and the butterfly life is the best I've seen all summerIn 1963, one year before this line closed to passenger traffic under Richard Beeching's cuts to the rural railway network, the enthusiast Alan Snowdon made a home movie of the train journey from Darlington into the heart of this dale, to Middleton-in-Teesdale. It's a delightful record of a country branch line, sadly used by too few passengers to make it financially viable, but now the Tees Valley railway walk - an easy rambler's route into the countryside - is probably followed by more people than travelled along it during the line's final years.In Snowdon's movie there is a glimpse of the view that we are enjoying now, from the viaduct high over the River Balder. A gusting southerly wind is sending cloud shadows racing across the landscape, torturing tree canopies in the wooded gorge far below, threatening to blow our hats over the parapet. Continue reading...