Slingsby may have lost its post office, but its grapevine is working well.

Apart from a man tending his roses, there's no-one around when I pull up in the village, which looks like the kind of picturesque location surely destined to become the setting for a Sunday teatime drama.

But behind the immaculately- kept gardens and the chocolate box houses, trouble has been brewing, and when word gets round someone from the Yorkshire Post and a couple of representatives from Royal Mail have come to see how Slingsby is faring two months after its post office closed, the troops are mobilised. It's a slick, almost military operation.

A couple of the village's retired residents who make use of the mobile post office service introduced following the closure, by way of compensation, are the first to sound the bush telegraph. Next, a woman dressed in what looks like chef's whites is sent ahead with a message that a local councillor who lives a 20-minute drive away has been alerted and is on her way.

Within the hour, a steady stream of irate villagers have stopped whatever it was they were doing to make their
feelings clear, and a farmer from the next village has arrived on his tractor, joining others on mobility scooters.

The reaction is impressive if not perhaps surprising. Slingsby, like many other villages, had what seemed on the face of it a thriving post office, but when the Royal Mail was ordered by the Government to make savings, it was deemed just not profitable enough.

Before confirming which offices were going to be consigned to history a consultation process was launched, but as lifelines were thrown to very few of those originally earmarked for closure, many have since described it as a sham.

"As far as everyone round here was concerned, the post office was thriving," says 74-year-old Alick James, who until retiring nine years ago ran the post office in nearby Hovingham, which has also since closed.

"When we heard it was one of those they wanted to shut we were shocked, but we genuinely thought that at the end of the consultation process it would be saved.

"Now I think the decision had already been made and we have to put up with the mobile service.

"It's just not good enough and it has generated a great feeling of annoyance. There's no privacy, when it's wet people have to stand out in the cold, and the times are just ridiculous.

"It comes for two hours, four mornings a week. That's fine if you're retired, but what if you're not? I think it was convenient for those behind the closures to ignore the people who would
be affected. "

As Alick begins his two-and-a-half mile drive back to Hovingham, Patricia Hearnshaw arrives with a friend, relieved not only to find there's no queue, but that the computer equipment is actually working. The previous week the van couldn't get a signal, and while the Post Office representatives offer encouraging tales of an even more remote service which has been operating successfully in Cumbria for two years, the villagers aren't yet ready to believe them.

"People were having to come back every 10 minutes to see if it had been fixed, but who wants to take an hour out of their day wandering to a van and back again empty-handed?" says Patricia. "There's lots of elderly people in the village and the old post office was much more than a business. If people needed help filling out forms, they would get it, and I really don't know how we will go in the winter.

"You have to walk down quite a steep hill to get to where the van parks up and if it's icy then someone could have a really nasty fall."

If the Royal Mail representatives had begun to regret their decision to come along for the ride, they weren't about to show it and, in face of the criticism, stuck to their now well-rehearsed script.

"No one is happy to lose their post office, people don't like change," says Liz Morgan, field change adviser. "However, when we started the review, we had very strict criteria which branches had to meet. We couldn't just stick pins in a map and say, 'Right, we'll
close that one, that one and that one'.

"People who live in a village like Slingsby might see a busy post office, but what they don't see are the overheads which we have to pay for things like the technological support and equipment maintenance, all of which cost money. A lot of money. The reality is that Slingsby post office wasn't profitable for us."

Commercial confidentially prevents them revealing exactly how much individual offices cost, but their response is a red rag to the bullish people of Slingsby, and if there was one person they perhaps wish hadn't needed a book of stamps that day, it's Joyce Hodgson. Her husband Tony was the man who ran the village's post office, and she says while the closure was going ahead, he received a
letter from his soon-to-be ex-employers congratulating him on his long service.

"The postmasters were so loyal and what really sticks in the throat is the way they were treated," she says, eying Liz and her colleague Graham Moore with more than a degree of suspicion. "A petition went round the village, but what we thought didn't seem to matter."

It's a feeling shared by all the villagers, so much so that one will later refuse Graham's offer of an umbrella, preferring to stand in the rain rather than share shelter with the enemy.

"I think they think we're stupid, but we're not," says 79-year-old Richard Valentine.

"I had to wait in for a delivery this morning. Fortunately, it came on time, but if it hadn't, I'd have missed the van and would either have to make a 20-mile round trip to Malton or wait two days to send a letter that's too big to go into the normal post box. Surely that can't be right. It's a phenomenal inconvenience."

Wondering aloud whether I had tipped the village off about the visit, Graham and Liz barely have time to draw breath before the arrival of North Yorkshire County Councillor Clare Wood, determined at last to speak to real-life people who work for the often faceless organisation.

"You talked about usage figures and profitability, but no one
ever spelled out what was wrong with Slingsby in black and white," said Coun Wood. "The public meetings were attended by hundreds of people and out of the 650 people living in Slingsby, 350 signed the petition.

"Access to a post office is just as vital as subsidised buses, but they don't seem to care. Rural areas are not like towns and you can't treat them as such.

"It seems crazy that there was a facility already up and running and yet they replaced it with a mobile service costing thousands of pounds and providing only a limited service. What's the logic in that?"

Liz bravely attempts an explanation, but when she commits the cardinal sin of mistaking the area's Howardian Hills for the Hambleton Hills, it's further proof for Coun Wood that those responsible for the closures had no idea of the day-to-day realities of rural life.

As the van prepares to leave Slingsby, it's the driver Geoff Simpson, the perennially cheery sub-postmaster from Helmsley, who sums up the previous two hours.

"You've stirred up a right hornets' nest there," he says. "I've got used to the complaints, all I can do is get on and do my job."

Sadly, that's not an option for Tony Hodgson, who admits it's something of an irony that, having run the post office for nine years, he now isn't able to pop out for a book of stamps.

"When it first started coming it parked just across the road, which was fine. When we were quiet, I could nip out and get what I needed, but apparently it wasn't the best place for the signal so now it's moved down the hill. It's not a million miles away from the shop, but I can't leave it empty.

"People have been very supportive of the shop, and we're still doing okay, but there just doesn't seem any rhyme nor reason to what the Royal Mail has done."

Everyone in Slingsby knows it would take a minor miracle for their old post office to reopen, but it has reawakened concerns that what happens in rural areas matters little to the city-based decision-makers.

As one of the villagers points out, in the 1960s, there used to be a train direct from Slingsby to King's Cross; now it can take over an hour to post a letter.

Times have certainly changed, but, according to the villagers
of Slingsby, not necessarily for the better.