Harry Mead: Don’t deface the jewel of our coastline by putting a potash mine near Robin Hood’s Bay

To understand why, let’s first look at the Cotswolds. A bewitching sight. Golden villages in a serene countryside. The home of Royals (Prince Charles, Princess Anne) and celebrities too numerous to count, though Anne Robinson, Liz Hurley and Jilly Cooper might provide a start.

No-one has been more entranced by the Cotswolds than JB Priestley. In his famous book English Journey, published in 1934, he calls their beauty “exquisite”.

Towards the end of his pilgrimage, he draws a comparison between the Cotswolds and Shotton, a colliery village in County Durham. He reflects: “No doubt it was fortunate for England that you could dig down at Shotton and find coal. But it did not seem to have been fortunate for Shotton. The Cotswolds were to be congratulated, it seems, on their lack of coal deposits.”

He adds: “Consider how artful the guardian spirits of this region have been. They would not allow it to be drawn into the ugly scramble for quick profits, and so have kept its charm intact, its beauty unravaged.”

But now let’s come closer – much closer – to Robin Hood’s Bay. Drive through the former ironstone mining area of East Cleveland – Guisborough to Loftus – and what do you see? Row upon row of former miners’ houses. Factories on the sites of abandoned mines. Modern bungalow infill. Not a pretty picture.

Strip out the accretions of the ironstone era and later and a very different East Cleveland emerges. The surviving old cottages tell of a district of small sandstone hamlets, set in a rolling countryside terminated, at Boulby and Saltburn, by two of the grandest cliffs in England.

But the transformation to an ironstone Klondyke ruined it all. And for what? The industry prospered for little more than its first 20 years – circa 1850-1870. After that came a long cycle of boom and bust, with overall decline, until the last mine, Skelton, closed in 1964.

Since then, the area has struggled. Remote from major transport links, it is unappealing to business. The degraded environment worsens this handicap. More crucially, it virtually rules out a future based on tourism, a main economic pillar of much of the North York Moors and even the Vale of Pickering, far less naturally blest than East Cleveland.

The message is: spoil your environment at your peril.

Of course, the promoters of the potential potash mine near Robin Hood’s Bay insist it will not damage the environment. Their claim rests chiefly on the intention to pipe the potash to a processing plant at Teesside or Hull.

But the mine will still require a pithead complex, which seems bound to include offices, a storage silo, maintenance sheds, canteens and changing rooms. The site will need to be fenced and, probably, part floodlit. What about a car park? How big will it be? It is hard to envisage the result being either near-invisible or in harmony with an otherwise unspoiled rural landscape.

Of the coast’s existing potash mine, at Boulby, the promoters of the new mine say: “Few people are aware of it.”

That’s for the very reason outlined above – that few tourists venture there. But I remember the scene before the mine was built. Directly beyond Easington, a mining village, a wonderful panorama opened up – fields sweeping down to the crab’s claw headlands of Staithes. I once picnicked with my parents overlooking this view, now dominated by the 20-acre potash mine.

But even more breathtaking than this vanished view is the prospect over the broad arc of pastoral countryside running down from the moors to Robin Hood’s Bay.

This is a highlight of Yorkshire’s Heritage Coast. Its cliff path, from “Bay” to Ravenscar, forms one of the very best sections of the Cleveland Way. A mine anywhere in this vicinity would be like defacing the setting of a jewel.

While the North York Moors National Park authority, the primary guardian of the region, holds its fire, Tom Chadwick chairman of the North Yorkshire Moors Association, a body of “friends” of the Moors, has put down almost the strongest possible marker. “A potash mine has no place in a national park,” he declares. Quite right. Planners please take note.

Priestley’s English Journey is esteemed for highlighting bad social conditions and the plight of the unemployed. But he also speaks up for the value of beauty. Of the twin Cotswolds villages, Upper Slaughter and Lower Slaughter, he says: “They should be preserved for ever as they are now. A man bringing a single red tile or a yard of corrugated iron into these two symphonies of grey stone should be scourged out of the district.”

Some might say the same punishment is now merited by anyone who destroys any of Britain’s shrinking heritage of unspoilt countryside. Priestley certainly believed some places should be sacrosanct.

Those “exquisite” Cotswolds inspired him to suggest: “It may be necessary to banish from these hills the grimmer realities of our economic life, to make them artificially secure.”

The benefit, he believed, would be “a countryside that will be able to give both body and spirit a holiday…”

If this view doesn’t prevail in a national park, where will it?

• Harry Mead is a retired journalist and author of two books on the North York Moors.