IT was hardly Charlie Dimmock's garden army. There were no television cameras and (how do I put this politely?) fewer appendages swinging in the wind. But the effect was pretty good nere-the-less.

The Doc and his long suffering wife, Mary, went off on their well deserved annual break last weekend to swot up on their Hellenic studies in Greece and marvel at a few mummies by the Nile. That's when we descended, like the swarms of locusts more readily seen in the latter location.

The Doc, an attentive reader might recall, is threatening to take early retirement, fed up with all the red tape of the NHS and the public slagging off his honourable profession has taken these past few months.

For we Beggarsdaleians, this would be a tragedy not quite as disastrous as the Ten Plagues of the aforesaid, but it would rate pretty close. So the plot that been hatching for some weeks exploded into action.

The Family Doc inhabits a pretty bleak piece of heather, rock and bog on the brow of Windmill Hill and he has expressed the desire to spend more time with his Jacob's sheep and what laughingly passes for his veg patch. Mary loves her alpines but her rockery resembles one of those townie council tower blocks after they have been (thankfully) dynamited.

Not that they are lazy: they work harder than almost anyone I know. They just don't have the time, you see, running a one-man general practice covering many square miles of rock, heather and bog etc.

Anyway, the minute their taxi took them off to the airport, Beggarsdale descended en masse. Owd Tom, Mid Tom and Yun Tom had the Jacobs penned up and sheared before they knew what had hit them.

John Bull and his monster son, The Bullock, moved even with their JCB and began to rebuild Mary's rockery with a speed that would have been envied by Israelites sweating over a minor pyramid (another biblical allusion!).

And Ben the Bucket, our demon gardener, took his power-cultivator to the veg patch, battering into shape like a typhoon flattening a forest. The heavy work was done by lunch-time and then the ladies set to work, planting the new rockery and Mary's little herb patch. Where did the plants come from? Ben had raided his seed bed for brussels, winter cabbages, kale and purple sprouting broccoli. He transplanted, admittedly at some risk, courgettes, marrows and even a pumpkin taken from his own allotment: whether they survive remains to be seen.

As for the plants, the open market in Marton had been raided constantly for the past month and every garden centre within 20 miles has done a roaring trade.

The day was almost over when a young man drove up in a rather smart car, walked round the old farm house and stood and stared. Scratching his head, he enquired politely: "Could you please explain what is going on here? Are all you people allowed to be on this property?"

It turned out he was the locum, a nice-ish sort of lad from Bradford. We tried to explain but he seemed puzzled. "Tha might not get this sort'a thing down Bradford way," said Owd Tom finally. "It's what tha calls community spirit."