I’M about to stand down as a Helmsley town councillor after 12 years in harness. Others will judge whether my fellow councillors and I have made a useful contribution over that period, but we have certainly tried our best to make the arcane mechanisms of local government work in the interests of residents.

In particular, I think we can be proud of the relationships we have built with Ryedale District Council and the North York Moors National Park, both of which have a big say in Helmsley life.

Having bent the guidelines for parish councils such as ours in order to publish our own policy document, called The Future of Helmsley, we have subsequently played a part alongside the two local authorities in the drafting of the Helmsley Plan, which will determine the scale and pattern of housing development in the town over the next 15 years.

On a different front, working closely with our county councillor Val Arnold, we have maintained a positive dialogue with County Hall in the search for a solution to preserve Helmsley’s treasured library.

In these and other ways, I think our low-cost town council demonstrates the principle that active citizens can make a real difference by engaging with the detail and talking to the bureaucracies involved in key local decisions – rather than by shouting from a distance, or just muttering, “Why bother?”

They’re all as bad as each other. I wish I could have achieved more in the past 12 years. but I’m glad to have had a go, and I salute everyone who is thinking of stepping forward as a parish or district council candidate in May. It’s well worth the effort.

Meanwhile, one of my final projects as a councillor is to help organise Helmsley’s celebrations, on Sunday, June 14, for the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta.

Our connection to this national event is that our baron, Robert de Ros, was one of the 25 sureties or guarantors elected to try to ensure King John abided by the terms of the charter, granting freedom under the law and dealing with other grievances that had brought England to the brink of civil war.

A pleasure of this task has been finding out what Robert did, apart from putting us on the Magna Carta map.

He was pretty ruthless in his own interests, it seems, but he made two enduring contributions to Helmsley. The first was to rebuild the Castle – until then a wooden fortress – in stone.

The second was to grant borough status to what was then a poor settlement of a couple of hundred people: he gave some townsfolk “burgage” rights, enabling them to pay rent for smallholdings rather than being tied to him in feudal service, and he licensed the market, a foundations of the town’s prosperity.

Robert de Ros was, it turns out, an active citizen who made a real difference and we can celebrate him in June as a role model for the next generation of town councillors.