THE family home was sold a year ago. Whenever I drive past, it looks much as before, the roses, trees and shrubs flourishing as in my parents’ day. Beyond the garden wall, however, everything has changed. The rich red farmland where barley and wheat once grew is now a playground for bulldozers. Going up at the speed of a spring tide, houses are filling the space that for half a century separated the old villages of Belhaven and West Barns.

Hundreds of properties will soon smother that lush field, which acted as a buffer between communities, and a boundary that defined identities as clearly as a sentry post. Meanwhile, up a nearby country lane, another new housing scheme has reached the outer edge of the village, bringing Dunbar into the back yard. Soon, all three places will be as one, indistinguishable from each other.

The onward creep of housing on greenbelt is the story of our times – and has been since before the Second World War. While the definition of greenbelt has changed over the decades, the principle behind it remains the same: to safeguard swathes of countryside from urban sprawl. Not only is this good for the environment but it is, in modern parlance, the “green pill” most require for a sense of well-being, that basic human need to be within easy reach of nature, where our troubles tend to fade.

Thus for some of us, news of each new assault is like the itch of a hair shirt that shrank in the wash. The scratchiness is getting worse, with the growing sense that what was once conceived as almost hallowed land is now vulnerable. If their pitch is persuasive enough, it seems, select and favoured companies are allowed to move in with their architects and diggers. You don’t need to be a maths whiz to realise that as a strategy this one is finite, there being only so much space to share out before it all disappears under concrete.

Concern over the ongoing diminishment of these precious spaces appears to be increasing as people awaken to the threat. Perhaps the Scottish Government’s cravenness in allowing Donald Trump’s golf course at Menie, not on greenbelt but on a legally ring-fenced Site of Special Scientific Interest, also prompted more to take heed. Whatever the reason, a poll conducted this summer by the Association for the Protection of Rural Scotland (APRS) found that seven out of 10 felt that greenbelt should be given stronger protection.

Their views confirm the helplessness we feel in the face of the steadily reduced countryside. High-profile cases in which the Government has acted against its advisors to consent to development include the Judy Murray tennis and golf complex at Park of Keir between Dunblane and Bridge of Allan, and the Pentland Film Studio at Straiton in Midlothian. A decision is pending over the prospect of Aberdeen Football Club’s new stadium at Kingsford. Far less prominent examples, such as in Belhaven, go under the radar, protestors easily dismissed or caricatured as nimbys fretting over the plummeting value of property.

Where many of us have clearly been wrong all these years is in considering greenbelt to be sacrosanct. It is no such thing. It is merely a term used for rural land where far stricter evaluation must be given to any suggested development. In an Orwellian effort to educate the public, planners and politicians are encouraging us to drop the Polo Mint image of greenbelt, and think instead of wedges – presumably like the dinky triangles of processed cheese that go into lunch boxes. So goodbye belt, hello braces. Other mental cartwheels are also necessary to explain why in a nation with an abysmal health record, and city districts with air quality so dire it makes Tokyo look like an alpine resort, greenbelt is brazenly breached.

It is too easy to claim that brownfield sites are often not suitable, or too expensive to upgrade. The idea of seriously long-term cost needs to be built into this argument. Politicians don’t like looking far into the future, where they fear seeing their seats filled by new faces, but that is what is required. In face of increasing pressure on out-of-bounds land, it is not for our leaders to buckle, or reach for a vote-winning quick fix, but to hold the line. Why otherwise was the concept first devised, if not to be safeguarded? And if regulations are so easily by-passed, what does it say about a government’s attitude to first principles?

On the evidence thus far, it is politicians and the construction trade who need re-educating, not us. They must be reminded that the countryside has a value even when it only soaks up the rain and sprouts weeds. And that the prospect of ever-receding meadow and heath and scrub is insidiously damaging to the nation’s wellbeing and to the ecology on which we depend. Equally destructive is the question it raises over the integrity of those who govern. As fast as the greenbelt is eroded, so too is our trust in them.