WEST Dorset MP Oliver Letwin considers the benefits of low-tech legwork.

THERE is a considerable tendency to imagine that progress consists in moving from low tech to high tech – and, often enough, this is perfectly true. But not always.

Some years ago, I came across an interesting counter-example. Utterly brilliant scientists and engineers created what was called global personal mobile communications. This ultra-tech system involves walking around with a mobile phone connected to a satellite. Billions of dollars were invested in hundreds of dazzlingly clever satellites.

The results, however, were not exactly dazzling.

The reason that most readers of this column will probably never have heard of global personal mobile communications despite the billions spent on it is that handsets were enormously large and enormously expensive, and they didn't work indoors. They were unceremoniously driven out of the market by ordinary mobile telephones.

In short, a lower tech item beat the living daylights out of the higher tech item.

But there is an even more extreme example of this phenomenon occurring before our very eyes, right here in England – and indeed in West Dorset.

Time was when people who wanted to get from one place to another mainly walked – unless they were rich enough to afford a horse or a horse and carriage. Then trains and bikes came along. Then the internal combustion engine, and finally the jet engine and its exotic counterpart, the rocket.

But, lo and behold! What is now happening is that the medics are teaching us that our very lives depend on reverting to the low tech solutions.

It turns out that walking, riding and cycling are a great deal better for us than all the high tech apparatus.

So I was delighted to see recently that Sustrans is making progress and is drawing more and more Dorset schools into its net – with the aim of persuading more and more Dorset school children to take up cycling on safe roads.

In both the literal and metaphorical sense, the wheel is turning.