It's all too easy to join like-minded people in a good cause and it's all too easy to lose interest because we feel that there isn't anyone listening but this is the time when the tough get going!

The pressure is really on our English countryside and none more so than in the area of Hertfordshire known to us as 'Forster Country'.

When the New Town of Stevenage was proposed people were encouraged to believe that this was an opportunity to build homes in an area where families could live in harmony with the countryside, a place where children could grow up amongst the green fields of Hertfordshire, and that was an admirable sentiment. Fifty or so years on that same countryside is threatened and there is, quite simply, no need.

It isn't just that E M Forster lived and wrote about the area now threatened by even more urban sprawl; it's because there are more than adequate alternatives. It's true that people need houses to live in but it's also true that people require places of natural beauty to enjoy and revel in as well.

I've never really understood why the 'powers that be' take the easy option when it comes to building more homes, why they eye up a wonderful piece of open countryside and say to themselves, "That would be easy to develop, plenty of fields to plough up, loads of open space to construct homes and won't the people thank us for it?"  Well, actually, no we won't and neither will our children or their children!

Take a stroll through any present day town centre and you will find derelict building sites just waiting to be developed. Cast your eyes around and upwards and you will see empty floors above shops just waiting to be refurbished.

There's an added bonus in this train of thought: we could breathe new life into our town centres, take the streets back from the graffiti artists and trouble makers who inhabit the places at night and still have beautiful countryside to walk in and admire close by. You don't have to be a brain surgeon to work it out.

They have done it in other countries so why can't we do it in our green and pleasant land?

My message is very simple, give up now and we are lost. It's been done before and it can be done again. Let those people who want to take the easy option know that we are not going to roll over and let them get away with cementing over our English countryside, tell them in no uncertain terms that we are here, we will keep up the fight and that they are wrong! 

Save Forster Country for us, for our children and, well, simply because it's worth preserving.