LAST week I had reason to visit Welshpool, but arriving a bit late for my meeting the main priority was to find a suitable country pub for some lunch.
Like many farms these days, there has been a big decline in suitable country pubs where you can enjoy a leisurely lunch of homemade steak and kidney pie with a pint in front of an open wood fire.
Having eventually satisfied by culinary needs with a good plate of bangers and mash without the open fire, I then found myself meandering around rural Shropshire.
This is a county best remembered from my school days when, because I was too young to drive, I was able to take in and understand what went on in the countryside.
In those days you could say there was a thriving rural environment as people could still remember the recent world war.
In the years before the war the country had run seriously short of food supplies as agriculture was seriously run down at a time of abundant supplies of cheap imported food.
In those days I remember most of the land on the Welsh side of Shrewsbury would have been small family farms with small herds of milk cows and other livestock often produced as a by-product of the milking cows.
A field of more than 10 acres would have been regarded as very substantial in those days.
The comparison with today could not have been more stark. You now have a lunar landscape of arable land with virtually no livestock.
I hardly I saw a single person working the land on what turned out to be a scenic tour on a lovely sunny spring afternoon - except for one person driving a big green tractor with a hedgecutter.
We seem to live in a country where the wild birds are the dominant animal species in the countryside.
During the daytime there are no people there. They have all jumped into their modern motor cars and commuted into their local towns and cities where I suppose they either work in the public services or their local supermarket.
It must be one of the most remarkable achievements of our present government as to how they have depopulated our countryside during the daytime.
I was not there at a weekend when our new-age commuters return to walk their dog or go jogging or cycling along our country lanes.
Some time I may write about the demise of sugar beet in Shropshire. Sugar beet has always been one of the staple agricultural crops east of Shrewsbury, but on this rural ramble I did not get that far.
