A report by our members, Sturminster Newton Open Spaces Group, Dorset on the Butts Pond Meadows Project. 
A project implemented by the SturQuest Open Spaces Group
 

Background

SturQuest is the community company for Sturminster Newton and its surrounding area in North Dorset. It was established by, and is run by, volunteers with the aims of influencing, encouraging and helping to direct the way that the town evolves over the coming years, with the aim of benefit to the town and surrounding communities. The organisation was founded to counter effects of the closure in 1997 of the town’s long-established and very important livestock market. The Open Spaces Group is a sub-group of SturQuest, charged with the conservation, maintenance and improvement of public open spaces within and adjacent to the town boundaries and with providing assistance in planning matters affecting rights of way and long-distance paths.
 

Butts Pond Meadows

Historically, the Meadows area was a pleasant open space, with a number of ponds which have long supported a population of the Great Crested Newt, a species designated for protection within the UK Biodiversity Action Plan. Housing and industrial development encroached on this open space and resulted in the loss of ponds, and the once improved grassland became overgrown and weed-infested. Dredging over-deepened the one significant remaining pond and rendered its banks undesirably steep, both for the safety of children and for the habitat needs of the newts. The newt populations should ideally have access to a cluster of ponds and wetted areas, to allow movement and the establishment of sub-populations to avoid interbreeding, as well as a terrestrial habitat including grass swards, ditches and hedges.

Ownership of the fields that make up the Meadows was made over to the Sturminster Newton Town Council in early 2005, as part of a range of local planning agreements. The Open Spaces Group had already initiated a project for the improvement, conservation and maintenance of the Meadows. Regular mowing was undertaken, and substantial volunteer effort went into hedge-laying and scrub clearance. It was agreed that the Open Spaces Group, with the valuable advice and assistance of the Dorset Countryside Rangers, would work with the Town Council in implementing a Management Plan for the site, and would seek funding and act as an agent in the execution of appropriate works.
 

Project Aims

The principal aims of the Butts Pond Meadows Project were:

• To maintain the Meadows as an open space for the public benefit.

•  To establish and maintain the Meadows as a conservation area

•  To provide a section of the Jubilee Path (a planned non-vehicular access route to Sturminster Newton town centre from the north, with a potential extension towards the south of the town)
   

Achievements

By late 2005, the following had been achieved:

•  Extending the main pond and grading the banks to improve the habitat for the newts.

• Creation of the Jubilee Path across the Meadows.

•  Provision of vehicular barrier to protect the Path.

• Planting of trees to screen an industrial site to the south of the Meadows.

• Provision of notice boards and signage.

• Installation of simple rustic benches. Provision of litter and dog waste bins.

• Sowing of meadow grass and flowers.

Financial support was received from The Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, the Carnegie Trust, Wessex Water, Liveability and Dorset County Council.

The Meadows have been designated a Local Nature Reserve (the first in North Dorset). They were formally opened in July 2005 at an Open Day which included substantial involvement by local schoolchildren. The area has become popular with nearby residents for walking and as a means of off-road access to the town.

Further plans include continued work to improve habitat for newts (based on advice from the Herpetological Conservation Trust) and for other wildlife including butterflies. Work also goes on to improve the grass, increase wild flower growth, and maintain the quality of the area. Much of this continues to involve volunteer effort.

In December 2005 the Butts Pond Meadows Project was awarded the North Dorset District Council’s “People and Places” award for the Best Environmental Community Project, and one of the volunteers, James Martin, received the award for Best Contribution to the Environment by a Resident.

Update 2 September 2005: Since writing the article below, we are delighted to say that NPTCBC REFUSED the Awel Aman Tawe proposal for wind turbines on the Gwrhyd unanimously.

Recent Government documents on renewable energy, Planning Policy Statement 22 (PPS22) from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister in England, and Technical Advice Note 8 (TAN8) published as a ministerial document by the National Assembly for Wales, specifically encourage wind energy over other renewable energies, and make it easier for wind-energy developments to take place on common land, which occupies three per cent of England and eight per cent of Wales.

At the same time, wind energy has been prioritised over most other renewables by the government requirement that electricity suppliers have to buy a proportional number of ‘Renewable Obligation Certificates’ (ROCs) for the amount of electricity they supply. This functions as a hidden subsidy to the new wind-energy companies, who are awarded ROCs in proportion to the amount of wind energy produced. These ROCs can be traded on the open market and fetch up to six or seven times the price for the actual electricity produced. Renewable-energy producers who have been functioning for many years (mainly hydro schemes) generally do not qualify. Thus wind-energy companies can expect to make considerable sums and can easily afford to offer landowners large rewards – a normal price being about £5,000 per turbine per annum.

The windier parts of the UK are already experiencing an unprecedented number of applications for wind ‘farms’. (In Scotland, which had its corresponding ministerial document over a year earlier, there are around 600 applications in for Caithness alone.) Northern England and the west coast are seeing increasing numbers, and in Wales there is a backlog of applications which have been ‘held’ by wind-power companies until the publication of the TAN8.

Commons in Wales

Commons in Wales is generally large upland commons, many of which have been targeted by wind-energy developers. They work from a map showing estimated relative wind-speeds across the UK. The recent TAN8 not only advises local authorities that there is no absolute constraint against development on common land in the case of wind energy, but also includes maps of ‘Strategic Search Areas’ (SSAs) where large-scale windfarms are to be encouraged. These SSAs include many upland commons in several parts of Wales.

There are currently three proposals for wind-turbine development on common land in SSA ‘E’; which is an area between Swansea and close to the edge of the Brecon Beacons National Park. The commons here – Betws and the Gwrhyd*  where applications have been submitted, and Mynydd-y-Gwair - have spectacular views across the Bristol Channel to Devon, Somerset, Pembrokeshire, the Brecon Beacons and Black Mountain. They are much enjoyed for walking, particularly by the local, closely-populated valley communities.

The largest proposal (currently 34 turbines, up to 112 metres high) is for Mynydd-y-Gwair, an urban common with rights to walk and ride, in the north of the City & County of Swansea unitary-authority area.

A recent 17-page booklet by Npower, the wind energy company proposing the development, completely omitted the fact that it was a common, referring to it throughout as ‘moorland’. The absentee owner, the Somerset Trust, (the family trust of the Duke of Beaufort, who is Lord of the Manor of Gower and owns all the Gower commons) has given permission. The Gower Commoners’ Association, whose members hold common rights and graze Mynydd-y-Gwair, are opposing the development as are over a dozen local and national groups and organisations.
 

Opposition

The reasons for the opposition are various. The common is maintained by a system of hefted grazing – where the sheep andcattle have been hefted over many years to remain on their own part of the mountain without the need for fences or constant shepherding. This ‘instinct’ is passed down from mother to daughter. Not only would this be disrupted during the construction of a windfarm, but the common would be completely unrecognisable to them afterwards.

Each turbine requires a concrete base the size of an Olympic swimming-pool, a huge road for construction and maintenance, a building at its base, and of course connections for the electricity. Then there are ‘borrow pits’ (quarries) for the roads, concrete-mixing areas and, somewhere, a power-station compound with security fencing and probably floodlighting. The disturbance to the soils (mostly peat with large areas of blanket bog) will cause large areas to dry out – the oxidation resulting in a huge loss of carbon to the atmosphere - and disintegrate. At night, turbines may have to be lit because of the danger to aircraft. By day, the noise and shadow-flicker off the blades of the turbines (which can appear to be rotating slowly but have a tip-speed of over 200 mph) will turn the common from a remote and peaceful place, where the normal sounds are of skylarks, buzzards and red kites, into a semi-industrial area.

Graziers do not believe that it will be possible to re-establish a hefted system of grazing and, as the common is integral to the farming operations of many of them, they will go out of business. Not only are they also concerned about the knock-on effect on adjacent, unfenced, commons, but they foresee the disappearance of a way of life and land management passed down over hundreds of years.


Exchange land

They anticipate that exchange land may be put up for the ‘loss of grazing,’ this being worked out on the area of the common occupied by roads, turbines and turbine bases. This would be of no help whatever as regards hefting problems or the changing appearance and shape of the common.

In the proposed new commons bill, the clause (15) on exchange land (‘replacement land’) contains the power to exchange common land (‘release land’) for other land, now subject to a public-interest test determined by the Secretary of State for Environment or the National Assembly for Wales. When questioned at the recent annual general meeting of the Open Spaces Society, officials from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs could not confirm that this would be in the ‘public interest’ of those people having rights on, or using or visiting the common in question. They would not rule out the possibility that the secretary of state or assembly would take the view of what she or it considered the greater planetary good.

Mynydd-y-Gwair is just one common; the problems in the pipeline are similar for many. It seems inequitable that such disruption should take place for the sake of the achievement of a meagre supply of intermittent and unpredictable energy, requiring fossil-fuel back-up, and a technology which the wind energy companies themselves admit will be overtaken by other renewables in the next 20 years.

Jan Moseley   
25 August 2005

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Summary of the long fight to save Barningham High Moor in County Durham
by Elizabeth Mann (updated to November 2001) can be obtained by sending a cheque for £1.30, made out to Elizabeth Mann, to
26 Millbank Court, Darlington, Co Durham DL3 9PF. All profits go to the Open Spaces Society.