Enjoying A Beautiful Walk - Without the Threat of Chicken City

Sometimes you don't realise what you've got until it's gone. It wasn't like that with the chicken broiler farm applications from Messrs Davies and Hern. We all knew what we would lose if they were to go ahead. Now we can enjoy the countryside knowing that the Planning Inspector could see the devastating impact that the huge scale of these buildings would have on this landscape and Dismissed the Appeal to build four sheds housing 160,000 chickens. This would have resulted in around 1.2 million chickens per year. 

The weather was beautiful today - cold at -1C but clear and great for birdlife that was enjoying the sunshine as much as I was.

Here amongst the comments on the application and the NPPF are views around Upton Snodsbury, North Piddle and Naunton Beauchamp, showing the beautiful landscape that was under threat.

View towards North Piddle Church

I think many of the members of the Wychavon Parishes Action Group (WPAG) would have felt as I did that we were never going to give up on fighting the application. The bullishness of Mr Pick the agent for Mr Davies served only to make us want to defeat it more. Fortunately we could see that his behaviour was typical of his attitude at many of the application sites and his ability to antagonise wherever he goes seems to be a theme. He has won very few friends in this process and his failure (whilst quoting an almost 100% success rate on his website!) is a landmark result.

Reeds at Piddle Lake

North Piddle Lane with Mistletoe covered trees

View from North Piddle Lane towards Bredon Hill

Most Bluetits are hard to get decent photos of!

So many blue tits along the lanes, with their constant chatter

Fieldfares are quite common grazing around the sheep grazing

 

View towards Upton Snodsbury

The view from North Piddle towards Upton Snodsbury - the chicken farm site is about 1/2 way between these two points.

Bullfinch

Bullfinch

Blossom!

Great Tit

The Old House, Naunton Beauchamp

Naunton Beauchamp

Naunton Beauchamp

The first sign of Spring - Snowdrops

Naunton Beauchamp cottage - The Way dating from late 1600s

Naunton Beauchamp Cottage dating from late 1600s

Where the National Planning and Policy Framework (NPPF) was designed to simplify matters of planning it only served to open up interpretations of the rules enabling inappropriate developments to go through as many in the countryside will agree. 

The Wildlife Trusts' concern was that Local Councils' policies needed to be robust and up to date. Whilst great in theory, in practice where local plans were delayed the floodgates were opened up to these developments.  

We are fortunate that in our case that the local Council - Wychavon for whom I have the utmost respect for the professional way that they dealt with this high profile application, took a stand that the NPPF criteria had not been met. And the Planning Inspector agreed.