OVER the hills and far away... how that folk tune learnt at my teacher’s knee in a village primary school so many years ago still resonates down the years.

My first formal education took place in a small single-roomed building that stood in one of the two streets that made up the community in north Warwickshire in which I grew up.

My personal universe was correspondingly small. Every story learnt in Mrs Butler’s class was given a localised framework in a blank-sheet-of-paper mind that had yet to experience much beyond the nearby town.

Consequently, those hills mentioned in the song were naturally those that formed the low ridge a mile or so to the north of the village.

And that was far away to me.

These childhood perceptions came rushing back one weekend when I paid a visit to the green acres of my Warwickshire homeland that may soon be covered with wind turbines.

These monstrosities are the latest confidence trick being imposed by vested financial interests and their new bedfellows the Green Party.

Down that village street I went, past the horse chestnut on the green and then up to the old school that is now the villagers’ social club.

And it was then that the strains of those well-loved folk tunes started to fill my head, a medley of sounds that defied time and distance.

Shenandoah… where exactly was the wide Missouri and who was the beautiful Indian maiden who had so entranced the writer?

Spanish Ladies… “We’ll rant and we’ll roar like true British sailors” went the chorus. Aged seven, I wanted to run away to sea as soon as I heard this one.

And those darkly mysterious ladies, all frilly black flamenco skirts, tied-back gleaming hair and coal-black eyes to match. I must meet them one day. Barbara Allen, too… was it really possible to die of a sickness called love?

I wonder if children’s imaginations are set free like this today.

Perhaps not – this is the age of logic, computers and ‘activities’, all a far cry from metal dustbin lids as shields and ash poles cut from the hedge to make bows and arrows.

And that’s why I’m so glad to have been given the freedom to dream of what lay over the hills and far away.