VILLAGE halls are becoming the latest places to buy your stamps and collect your pensions ? and Belstone is no exception.

Okehampton Post Office, which set up a part-time satellite service in Exbourne Village Hall last year to save the facility from closure, has come up trumps again ? this time for Belstone.

Thanks to retiring postmistress Elaine Lush and her husband, Peter, the post office will continue in their premises until such time as all the paperwork, legal requirements and alterations are completed for it to move into the village hall.

Post office duties in Belstone have been the responsibility of Mrs Lush?s family since the 1930s but yesterday (Wednesday) they called it a day.

Villagers feared the post office would disappear because any candidate willing to take on the position of postmaster or postmistress would also have to have suitable premises from which to run it.

But a community effort led by parish councillor Marion Walpole has meant Belstone will have a post office long into the future.

She said: ?Elaine and Peter have very kindly allowed the satellite service to run from their premises until the village hall is ready to operate it.

?It will not be a full-time service but Tuesday and Thursday morning are better than nothing and the main thing is Belstone Post Office is not closing.?

February is expected to be the month that the office moves into the village hall and campaigners are keeping their fingers crossed that a Government grant to help keep rural post offices open will be forthcoming to carry out some minor alteration work.

Mrs Walpole saidthat apart from the pub, Belstone had no businesses where a post office could be housed, and with only 260 residents there had been a real threat to the future of the service.

?Running a satellite service from the village hall is the perfect solution because its keeps the costs down for the post office, we get someone already trained to do the job and it makes a good use of our very large hall which is not used to its full potential at the moment,? she said.

The success of the post office in Exbourne Village Hall, which also combines a cafe and gift shop, has given lots of hope to other small parishes struggling to keep their post offices open.

Mrs Walpole hopes that the village hall post office will be the catalyst to lots of other services and projects being set up in Belstone.

Robin Cassell from Post Office headquarters said Roger McLean, who was based at Okehampton Post Office, would be running the same service in Belstone as he did in Exbourne on Mondays and Fridays.

Mr Cassell said: ?It is good news for us because there will be a continuation of service in Belstone.

?We were seeking a suitable candidate to take it on in the village but unfortunately in this day and age small communities do not have sufficient business to make the proposition viable.

?Post offices have usually been run hand-in-hand with village shops but villages shops are not the pillar of society they used to be.?

He said more and more villages were coming together and establishing their own companies to run community shops manned by volunteers.

?We have seen it done in Exbourne and in other areas of Devon and it could well be the way forward for other rural communities,? he said.