Under the Commons Act 2006, land that has been used for informal recreation for at least 20 years by local people without challenge or permission can be registered as a village green. Once registered, it is protected from development.

Fears that the land might be built upon saw the Moorside Fields Community Group attempt to register the fields as a village green in 2008. The group won its case in the high court and the court of appeal. But the supreme court judgment, by a majority of three to two, has reversed the earlier decisions.

“This is a deeply worrying decision as it puts at risk countless publicly owned green spaces which local people have long enjoyed, but which, unknown to them, are held for purposes which are incompatible with recreational use,” said Nicola Hodgson, case officer for the Open Spaces Society, which campaigns for the protection of town and village greens. “We urgently need a change in the law to ensure our precious green spaces are protected.”

The county council, which owns the land, had objected on the grounds that the fields might be needed for the expansion of the local school. Some parents feared such a move would open up the school playing fields to the wider public, something that constituted a threat to pupil safety. Handing down its judgment in favour of the council, the court also quashed a separate attempt to grant three hectares of a wood in Surrey, owned by the NHS, village green status.

The ruling is a major setback for open space campaigners who have enjoyed mixed fortunes down the years. A House of Lords decision in 1999, approving the right of the village of Sunningwell in Oxfordshire to register a strip of land as a village green, saw similar applications mushroom across the country.

But the introduction of the Growth and Infrastructure Act in 2013 stipulated that land which had been subject to planning applications could not be granted village green status, staunching the flow of further registrations.

“This ruling reflects what’s going on at a broader level in our society,” Bebbington (local campaigner) said. “Every bit of green space has to be available for development because suddenly land is gold, especially to local authorities that don’t have any money. These spaces are community assets that help to keep us healthy and they are very important. They connect communities but they are taking them away from us.”

Villagers have described the theft of a “cheeky” street sign as “pathetic” and a “sad state of affairs”.

Residents said the sign for Bell End in Wollaston, Northamptonshire, is regularly taken, with the latest theft happening on Tuesday afternoon.

The road, along with its namesake in the West Midlands, often features in top 10 lists of rude street names.

Resident Christine Thurland, 80, said: “I don’t understand why would anyone want to do something so silly.”

She said it was “pathetic” the sign had been stolen.

Villager Neil Balderson, 39, said: “It has been a well-known feature in the village and there is a cheeky side to it.

“We regularly have people stop for photos and it’s not unknown for people leave their mark with stickers and suchlike.

“The sign being taken is really quite a sad state of affairs.”

Scarecrows of Poldark and Demelza, Peter Rabbit and a whisky-drinking businessman have appeared in a rural village in the north of England.

They are among about 50 created for the 20th annual scarecrow festival in Rennington, Northumberland.

Church warden Paul Weston said the money raised from visitors was needed to keep the village hall and the church open, and it was “very grateful”.

With no rules “we just don’t know what’s coming out each year”, he said.

“You may find that there are some very political scarecrows around – it wouldn’t surprise me if you don’t find the odd politician with a rope around his neck,” Mr Weston said.

Hundreds of villages have lost their GP surgery amid a deepening crisis across the country, an investigation reveals.

Experts said rural and coastal areas were being hit particularly hard by a national shortage of family doctors, forcing elderly and vulnerable patients to travel ever further for care.

The figures reveal 1,946 villages which are at least three miles from the nearest GP practice – 162 more than was the case just two years ago.

They include 206 areas where patients are forced to travel at least five miles – a 12 per cent increase on 2017 – with distances of up to 14 miles in some parts of the countryside.

Nevertheless, Darren Hayman, whose gig it is, seems unfazed. His current musical project is called Thankful Villages, its name and inspiration taken from the term coined by writer Arthur Mee for those villages in Britain where all those who served in the first world war returned home alive: one of them was Maplebeck, making it a fitting launch venue.

Thankful Villages may well be Hayman’s most ambitious project yet. After reading Mee’s book series The King’s England, he came up with the idea of visiting all 54 villages and writing a song or a piece of music “either born there, or affected by my visit there”, as well as making a short film and a watercolour painting in each. “I liked the sound of the phrase ‘Thankful Villages’ and it appealed to ideas I have about randomness in music, about setting myself tasks. I thought the paintings and the films sort of proved that I was actually doing it,” he laughs. “I felt I could have just said I’d gone to 54 villages and written a song. So, in the first few, there’s quite a lot of footage of me with a guitar and a microphone.”

A popular actress and TV star has warned that villages need to “change with the times” in order to survive in the face of development and an exodus of young people to towns and cities.

Dame Penelope Keith is best known for her role as the snobbish suburbanite Margo Leadbetter in 1970s sitcom The Good Life, but has actually lived in a Surrey village for three decades.

After touring the country – including Dorset and Somerset – for a new programme looking at country life, she has concluded that rural communities should “adapt as well as preserve the best of their pasts”

Dame Penelope is fronting a new three-part television series exploring the “the changing face” of rural Britain.

She has taken with her a series of guidebooks published by Batsford in the 1930s which detail rural life eight decades ago, in order to highlight the changes over time.

The actress, who lives near Godalming, said she feared that village life is under threat.

She said the experience “drew attention to a common theme in the series: the loss of young people from our villages.”

“One does tend to get this idea that it’s a load of old codgers tottering around, like me, with straw in their hair, but it’s not, a lot of them are thriving,” she added.

Dame Penelope said if a second series is filmed, she would like to venture “far down into Cornwall, which is often neglected”.

Penelope Keith’s Hidden Villages begins today (Tuesday) at 9pm on More4.