reprieved

It looks as though Frating will not get a gravel quarry.  The draft report was published today, to be signed off by the council next week and then sent off to the Secretary of State for approval next year, and Frating's name was not on the list.  The Systems Administrator saw the news in the local paper while waiting at the dentist's.

It isn't time to put out the bunting and cheer in unalloyed joy just yet.  I've seen enough other parishes be told that quarrying applications were quashed, only for the applications to spring up again or the rejection be challenged.  I won't consider we're completely out of the firing line until the list of approved Essex sites has been finalised and authorised at the highest level, and the parish of Frating is not on it.

The SA was not utterly surprised to be left out.  Potential new quarrying locations under consideration were scored on various factors and ranked, and Frating came very near the bottom of the list, around thirtieth out of thirty.  The main point in our favour, as a site for gravel extraction, was that we are on the east side of Colchester and so handy for the Bathside Bay container port development.  Plans for that was recently kicked back into the long grass, but I don't know if it made a difference to the quarry decision, as a friend who has lived in these parts for longer than we have assures me that it has been rumbling around for the past forty years, and the life of the quarry was to have spanned twenty.

The quarry, had it gone ahead, would have removed ten per cent of the entire land area of the parish, taking out the centre, between the original Frating and the newer Frating Green, which is by degrees appropriating the name of Frating.  We should probably start calling ourselves Old Frating.  Or Frating Original.  Pretty much every property in the parish would have been affected by planning blight, to a greater or lesser extent.  Maybe that played a part in the final decision.  Extending existing quarries is rough on the people who live near them, but not as costly in terms of aggregate blight as hitting a whole new parish.

The quarry was due to operate for twenty years, once it started.  One of my anxieties was that if it had been approved, since this was a county wide long term minerals plan, work might not have begun for years, pending the reactivation of the port development plans.  While this would have been a relief on a day to day basis while we lived here, if we had needed to sell potential buyers would have imagined the worst about the noise, and the traffic, and the dust.  Plus the quarry was supposed to be turned into a nature reserve at the end of its life, but there would always have been a lingering fear that when it came to that point it might have been used as a landfill site instead, or to house some region wide recycling facility, as has been threatened at a neighbouring village.

Maybe our environmental objections played a part in getting our parish dropped off the list.  We warned of the risk to ancient woodland if the effect of keeping the new quarry pumped free of water was to cause the water table to drop.  Maybe the argument that this was farmland that ought to be used for growing food had some effect.  I very much doubt that those sorts of considerations made a blind bit of difference.  Assuming that Frating stays off the list and it is all signed and sealed next Tuesday, my guess is that we were saved by the fact that we are east of Colchester and most economic development in Essex isn't.  Location, location, location.

Sometimes I have worried we chose our house unwisely, and should have paid up for a smaller property somewhere more upmarket, within the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty along the Stour or in a village protected by listings and heritage value.  But nowadays nobody is safe.  High speed rail links, pylons, wind farms, solar farms, airport expansions.  You can be in the most remote part of Britain, or the commuter heartlands of the Chilterns, and still come under the cosh.

Meanwhile, the Systems Administrator's second visit to the dentist resulted in the tooth being pronounced dead and the nerve drilled out, to be packed with antibiotics and temporarily capped.  The SA is relieved to be making progress towards a diagnosis and solution, but otherwise rather sore, now the anaesthetic's worn off.