I DID not intend to reply to critics of my article opposing the Whitby (Sneaton) potash mine. “I’ve had my say, let others have theirs” is my customary default position. However, the long and in part personal attack on me by Malcolm Bisby (D&S Times, June 19) prompts me to break my rule.

His hint that I am person who might be rolling in money, indifferent to the struggles of others, I pass over as unworthy – except to point out that I have three grown up children earning their livings in what I well know to be the far less secure world of work than when I was in harness. The potash debate centres on the status of our national parks. They are “national” because of their landscapes. Their protection is founded on a belief that beauty has a value for people. Parliament itself has endorsed this by decreeing that only in “exceptional circumstances” shall beauty yield to other factors. The Cleveland potash mine at Boulby – which, incidentally, wrecked one of the finest views in Yorkshire – was approved because it promised to make Britain self-sufficient in potash. Faced with the over-supply likely from the proposed Whitby mine, the North York Moors National Park Authority, despite offering no formal voting recommendation to members, has nonetheless now pronounced that beauty should come first.

There I could rest my case, but I think it might be worth adding some words of John Dower, the Yorkshire dalesman and civil servant whose visionary 1945 report formed the basis of the national parks. He urged that in judging proposed change, the “dominant criterion” should be “landscape values next to and in association with farming values”.

I’m sure that would get the vote of most of us, perhaps not least Mr Bisby, writing from within the strongly-rural community of Kildale.

Harry Mead, Great Broughton, Stokesley.