You must be up with the lark to peak at the park

It's a pleasing view as you enter the cricket ground at Queen's Park, Chesterfield. To your left there is a Chinese pagoda, to your right a summer house, complete with plants and flowers. Beyond the field, ringed with mature trees of great splendour, you can make out the famous crooked steeple of the parish church. The tents dispense pies and pints, and there is "award-winning" ice cream to be slurped, including a Bakewell Tart flavour (very good it is, too). This is a nigh-perfect slice of England in summer.

Just the place, you might think, to play cricket, and you would be right, even if few people appear to care for the County Championship these days. Sadly, some of those people are the ones who should put the highest price on its value. England players are excused championship duty as a matter of routine, even when they are out of form (Paul Collingwood was rested between the second and third Tests), and the game as a whole has gone barmy about the Twenty20 format, which, we are constantly told, offers the only path to salvation.

People in high places are now talking about establishing city teams, which runs against the grain of everything English cricket has ever stood for. Not for nothing is it called the County Championship. Derbyshire and Worcestershire, two counties which could hardly be more evocative of the spirit of this land, were playing at Queen's Park last weekend - Derbyshire bowling out the Severn-siders on an overcast first day, and going on to win by an innings and 95 runs.

In an ideal world county cricket would always be played at places like Chesterfield, preferably in festivals. Now only a few of these handsome grounds are in regular use: Cheltenham, Scarborough, Horsham, Arundel, Colchester. The clubs prefer to concentrate on their main ground and the players can be mistrustful of club pitches, though they usually provide a lively contest between bat and ball.

"This is the loveliest ground in the country," said John Hampshire, the former England batsman (and Test umpire), who played at Queen's Park for Derbyshire after he left Yorkshire. It was at Chesterfield in 1973, during his Yorkshire days, that he was involved in one of the most remarkable incidents in the history of the County Championship, when Brian Bolus, the Derbyshire captain, ordered his team's opening bowler, Alan Ward, from the field.

The pitch was hard and fast, as it often was in those days, and Ward, a genuinely fast bowler, was working up a fair head of steam. "It was almost like Perth," recalled Hampshire, who admitted to having "a good lunch and a beer" before renewing acquaintance with Ward in the middle. He put bat to ball so effectively that the bowler lost heart, obliging Bolus to tell him his fortune. Ward never really recovered from the humiliation.

There was another fast pitch 11 years later when the touring West Indians came to the park. That was the match John Wright, the flinty New Zealand opening batsman, battered by the short ball but never daunted by the challenge, made 90 of the bravest runs many spectators could remember seeing. Geoff Miller, now England's national selector, and a Chesterfield man himself, recalled that day as the only time that David Steele, a capable player of fast bowling, ever wore a helmet. Derbyshire folk still talk of Wright as one of the best overseas players they ever had, and one of the friendliest men.

Off the field the Derbyshire press box lives up to its reputation as one of the quickest tracks in the country; too quick for many a greenhorn. John Morris, the club's current director of cricket, was once passed off as "the Rev John Morris" to a young agency reporter, who duly elevated him to parson status when filing copy. The local journalists also fooled another credulous scribe into thinking that Dallas Moir, a tall bowler, was "the only Japanese to play county cricket" and "the youngest basketball player" to represent that country.

Best of all, perhaps, they managed to convince Henry Blofeld that Major Douglas Carr, the club's patrician secretary, had opened a nightclub in Swadlincote called Doug's Place, where he span discs all night long. "Oh, Douglas," Blowers was reported to have said, "you racy old thing!" Yes, it's always a lark in the park with the Peakite press. One more reason for visiting this delightful ground, and for hoping there will always be chances to return.