Driving through the road widening works at junction ten, I noticed a horse being ridden down a muddy passageway that was about to become the hard shoulder.

It had not yet been tarmacked, but the diggers had cleared away the trees from the slice of heathland and it was being flattened, in readiness for surfacing works.

A woman with a determined look on her face was coaxing her mount along this clearing, next to the machinery and the workers in their Day-Glo outfits, the Portaloos and logging machines, the lorries taking vast piles of felled trees away, and the hundreds of cones dividing this stretch of cleared woodland from the existing dual carriageway.

A few days later, I was again driving home along the A3 where it interchanges with the M25 at Wisley when I noticed a group walk going along the same stretch of cleared land: half a dozen people with walking poles and backpacks, again wearing implacable expressions, as if to say: ‘These roadworks aren’t going to beat us! We’re going to enjoy the Surrey heathlands until the very second they disappear!’

It came to me at that moment that Surrey is the capital of denial. People here, more than anywhere else, stubbornly keep going with this delusion that everything is fine with our countryside, and they will do so until the very moment reality bulldozes their last little slice.

To be fair, Surrey is in the frontline of whatever term you want to give to the disappearance of green space. But because of that, you would think the inhabitants would have the most realistic view.

Instead, they have the least realistic. Here you will find walkers in designer hiking boots with their hands over their ears to drown out the noise of the diggers, and ladies riding horses through major roadworks.

The M25/A3 intersection is being extensively widened at Wisley to ‘make your journey better’, as the signs say, but also to prepare the way to make other things a lot worse. A new town is proposed for Wisley airfield, which isn’t really an airfield, it’s farmland, with some old tarmac in places, but enough of that. The town is coming.

I joined a campaign to stop it for five minutes, and then realised that was utterly pointless, a waste of energy almost worse than walking down a new hard shoulder as it is being constructed.

The need for housing in this country is so great, and will become so much greater still, exponentially, that I do not see how anyone with a brain can possibly object to new houses being built while supporting all the policies that lead to the need for these houses, which is what this lot in Surrey do.

The Lib Dem posters and Ukrainian flags fly from the most salubrious of mansions and at the end of box-hedged driveways they fix their signs saying ‘No New Town Here!’. Are they having a laugh?

When I joined the campaign against this new town at Wisley, for five minutes, I spent that five minutes sitting in the wood-panelled dining room of a local multimillionaire’s country house, which backs on to the site in question, and I looked him and his wife and his friends sitting round the mahogany table in the eyes and I said: ‘You’ll need to put up protest signs.’

This was years ago, before the proposal got full traction, and one thing I did notice was that the locals seemed to be trying to keep this proposed new town of 2,000 houses a secret.

My argument was that if we informed the London daytrippers who came here to walk, picnic and enjoy the heathland that it was about to start disappearing, then we had a chance to start a meaningful debate, because the campaign would then be about the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of working families who need the green belt for their leisure and relaxation.

The millionaires stared back at me aghast. There was silence. Until one of them said: ‘But that would affect our house prices.’

So no protest signs went up, and I resigned from the campaign, because it was silly.

The villagers did their best, without signs, and ultimately the whole thing was nodded through in the traditional way, with no one able to work out how it had been so easily agreed if all the councillors were as against it as they claimed to be.

It was at that point that the residents of Surrey decided to start nailing up signs saying ‘No New Town Here’. The signs are absurd. Some of the houses displaying the signs are right next to the ransacked land where the Highways diggers are felling.

Of course, one should never live in a county that sounds like an apology. Surrey. Yeah, you should be.