IS it not ironic that the very technology that saved the English village from gradual abandonment, is the same which now threatens it most? What would we do without the motor car?

There is some truth within the romanticised myth of the village as it survives in the present – the reassuring church spire and a picturesque courtyard nearby; clustered around are houses of different shapes and sizes, with visible chimney pots; some sort of village green and a local shop; a pub and a village hall where people meet together and do interesting things. This is a fair description of East Morton, where I live, but you could apply it to a number of villages on the hills above this stretch of the Aire Valley.

Accounts of town planning routinely point at Bradford as a prime example of a city destroying its agricultural heritage for the sake of a misguided notion of urban living in the 'automobile age'. In the 1960s and 1970s, the councils adopted what was by then already an out-of-date American idea of bringing the highway into and through the city (the Robert Moses plan). This destroyed far more of what a city is than just its finely wrought buildings.

Turning our attention to Keighley, because of the manifest failure to work out an effective three-part bypass system, the town is in a constant state of traffic jam – irony upon irony then, that those cars are not actually visiting Keighley, they're passing through it.

One consequence of this is that an increasing number of drivers find it quicker and more convenient to take the scenic route along the narrow hilltop roads.

A few years ago, I sent you a letter with a rough estimate of the number of vehicles driving through Morton each day of the working week; I was surprised how many it is. What bothers me about this isn't just the quantity, it is the ill-mannered lack of consideration of a good many of those behind the wheel. I'm fed up of shaking my stick at 30mph-plus drivers; some even accelerate as they ease into the bend that passes the Busfeild Arms.

Where do they think they are? This is a village, inhabited by elderly people like myself, who walk slowly and with some difficulty; by mothers with pushchairs and toddlers; dog walkers; children walking to and from school, etc. The signs urging a maximum speed of 20mph are often ignored.

If I was given free rein, I believe I could stop this nonsense within the month – by the strategic use of small flocks of sheep, and herds of cows, ostensibly being moved from one field to another. And what shall we do with the transgressors? Well, how about another picturesque touch? A set of old-fashioned stocks on the green, so they can sit there for a few hours, and inhale deeply of the toxic fumes, swirling all around them!

Christopher Ackroyd (pedestrian), East Morton

* Email your letters to alistair.shand@keighleynews.co.uk