TERRINGTON made a pleasant start to a pleasant walk in the Howardian Hills, and I ambled out of the village on New Lane, cul-de-sac tarmac that soon acquires a mohican of grass.

The landscape is small-scale valleys, hills and nice farms, wet lands and old woods, just the ticket in the evening sunshine with long shadows and burnished corn. Sometimes you can see a fair distance, to a ribbon of the North York Moors, otherwise it is intimate.

Soon I came across my first combine of the summer, a smallish green one attended by a blue tractor. A balloon hung in the sky somewhere Castle Howard way and small birds skipped chirpily ahead in the hedgerows.

A farmer's wife tended to her geese, and a jolly farmer on a quad bike stopped to ask what I had my binoculars on. "Yellow-hammers?", I ventured. "Could be...could be," he mused and zoomed off to see to his combine.

Amidst a hatch of midges, I crossed Sawmill Beck. Through the woods you may glimpse Low Water, quite a sizeable lake. There is conservation work here and there, horses at the next farm, their sand schooling ring and then Sandy Hill. The sand is very fine grained and mixed with clay, the ground cracking in the fields. Irrigation jets glittered in the last sunshine, the farmers were watering their spuds, so I have done mine as it is bound to stay dry.

We cross Wath Beck where it runs pretty under the alders and the tall Himalayan balsams purple flowering now, with seed pods ready to dry and explode at a touch. I took the farm tracks up and round to Huskitt Hill. Rooks were noisily socialising, sorting out the day. There are characterful oaks. A dozen lapwings lifted from the next rise; below, a hare lolloped round rushes and tufted grass in the 'wetlands'.

Swallows were daredevil skimming the fields until a helicopter put the wind up them. Otherwise a quiet walk, no road noise, occasionally the soft chunder of an irrigation pump or the bang of a bird scarer.

We cross Wath Beck again, then we have the field edge back. As you would expect on a path that is both Ebor and Centenary Way the margins are quite wide, but they were surprisingly overgrown, though not awkward. The burr bushes have benefited, you will pass various burrs trying to hitch a lift.

From the ever so slightly rough to the very smooth - Terrington Hall's terraced playing fields, and that is it. And that would be it, no chance of a sundowner at the Bay Horse if Robert Snowdon manages to change the pub into a house.