THOUGH I don’t imagine I am telling anyone in Snape anything they don’t know, I thought it might be illuminating to a wider audience to highlight a handful of references over the last century or so to the village’s avenue of lime trees, now facing the axe.

Describing a walk from Bedale in Rambles in the North Yorkshire Dales, published in 1913, JE Buckrose wrote: “The path continues through lovely rural country and under a magnificent avenue of limes to Snape.”

In the North Riding volume of his renowned The King’s England series, published in 1941, Arthur Mee introduces Snape as “reached by a fine lime avenue”.

A splendid booklet by Alfred Taylor, Round the Yorkshire Castles, a collection of articles from the Yorkshire Evening Post in 1962, notes: “An avenue of 300-year-old lime trees forms a magnificent approach to the castle that has guarded Snape village for over 500 years.”

Doubtless there are many more similar references, which help to explain why the threat to the avenue has aroused such strong feelings.

Oh, I omitted to mention that the opening lines of a profile of Snape in The North Yorkshire Village Book, a compilation of village portraits by the county’s WIs, published in 1991, state: “The castle dominates the western end of the village and can be glimpsed through an avenue of limes…” Presumably the WI will be among those who wish that these two defining features continue to go hand in hand.

Harry Mead, Great Broughton