We met up the night before for a briefing, giving out information about exactly what is at stake and the most effective things that can be done to disrupt work.
We camped for the night in the nature reserve just round the corner, getting eaten alive by small flying biting things.
This time the police turned up in rather larger numbers and surrounded the works to prevent any disruption.
However, after coming to tell us what we could and couldn’t do over breakfast, they left us and waited at the works entrance, so we drove round to the back of the moor and entered from there.
You can easily see how beautiful the site could be, when you see the surrounding area, which supports a great diversity of wildlife (apparently 5000 species) from darting dragonflys to beautiful cotton grasses. We even noticed a birds nest in the heavily worked drainage channels on the site.
While wandering the site it was easy to see that the peat pixies had been busy tying to save their homelands. Drainage channels appreared to have been filled in while others had dams blocking them. Rumours were abound of fistier pixies getting to the machinery and workings of the site, but I can not comfirm this at all.
We found some work going on, which stopped when we arrived. It didn’t take long for the police helicopter to arrive and follow us around for the day, but they had no other police anywhere near us and the helicopter had to leave at some point to refuel, during which time quite a lot of damage occurred. A couple of machines that were left out were pushed into drainage ditches, every drainage ditch we passed was filled in and handy crowbars were used to pull up the railway track, hopefully causing massive delays as they would have had to check the whole rail network for damage.
When we left the moor we found the police waiting for us and being remarkably friendly. They requested everyone’s name and address, so instead of delaying and letting them find out what damage had occurred a whole load of false names and addresses were given, including Mr C. Cret and Claremont Road.
Please ask your local garden centre to not stock scotts compost as they are destroying a beautiful and ireperable habitat to get it. Whats more leaf mould actually works better than peat in compost for routeing properties (this is why peat is used as it has no nutritional value for plants). Leaf mould is made by piling up atumnal leaf fall and turning it occasionally. In a years time you will have the perfect substance to mix with compost from your veg waste to make a potting mixture.
This senseless maddness and destruction must stop.
For more info, http://www.peatalert.org.uk