ON crossing the Tees into Yarm, travellers used to be greeted with a bold sign mounted on sandstone.

Incorporating a county crest, it announced: “NORTH RIDING YORKSHIRE”. A similar sign, arguably the loneliest, stood near the Moorcock Inn, at the head of Wensleydale.

Where are those signs now?

Who knows, though perhaps one is the preserved example adorning a garage in a garden at Lastingham, in the North York Moors. But maybe that one came from Boroughbridge, where there was yet another North Riding sign. To be accurate it was just north of the bridge, since Borougbridge is a West Riding town.

It’s nice to imagine all these signs soon back in place, since the Government seems minded to do, at last, what many have been calling for since Ted Heath disastrously redrew the local government map in 1974. In a seemingly sudden awakening to the history and culture bound up in the old counties, and the attachment many feel for them, Communities Secretary Eric Pickles – a Yorkshireman – announced on St George’s Day, April 23, that the Government intends to resurrect the historic counties – by having them visibly identified.

The Keighley-born MP declared: “No Westminster official or European bureaucrat can remove people’s loyalty to the county they were born in.”

So he is to instruct – yes instruct – councils to erect signs on the boundaries of the true counties. Back will come Cumberland, Westmorland and Huntingdonshire. Somerset will start directly beyond Bristol, over the River Avon, rather than at some vague field further south. And of course the Yorkshire Ridings will return.

Not that they, or any traditional county, have ever gone away. Vital to Ted Heath imposing his changes were his government’s repeated assurances that the old counties, and the loyalties they inspired, would remain intact. Only administrative boundaries were being changed.

But the prominence of local authorities in community life soon ensured that the administrative counties bearing their names obliterated the historic counties, as those opposed to the changes always knew they would. “Keep Great Ayton in Yorkshire” read a poster in the front window of virtually every house in the North Riding village, boyhood home of Captain Cook, threatened with inclusion in “Cleveland”.

And in (North) Yorkshire it stayed.

In reality it would never have left even if annexed by Cleveland. But even Yorkshire folk have fallen prey to the belief that Heath abolished old Yorkshire. A year or two back, when Redcar, a Cleveland victim, was chosen for the principal ceremony marking Yorkshire Day, a West Riding friend said to me: “What’s it got to do with them? Redcar isn’t in Yorkshire now.” Like others, he had forgotten that Yorkshire Day’s original prime purpose was precisely to highlight the county’s true boundaries.

Formed in direct response to the Heath vandalism, the Yorkshire Ridings Society has of course battled manfully to uphold the county’s integrity: Yorkshire Day was its idea. Aided nationally by the Association of British Counties, the society six years ago succeeded in placing signs identifying the modern “Borough of Redcar and Cleveland” as “part of the historic North Riding of Yorkshire”.

In place of “part of”, the word “within”, suggesting belonging and warmth, might have been ideal. But better than either will be signs stating unequivocally: Yorkshire North Riding.

West and East, too, of course. Shame there’s never been a South Riding. As Mr Pickles, exiled from his native county as MP for Brentwood and Ongar, Essex, will surely agree, you can never have too much Yorkshire.