The Women Who Saved the English Countryside by Matthew Kelly

Author:Matthew Kelly
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300265309
Publisher: Yale University Press

Case Work

It is something of a truism that the National Parks Commission and the new authorities had little power to resist developmental pressures in the first decades of the system’s operation. As we’ll see in the next chapter, the ink was barely dry on the Dartmoor National Park confirmation order before the new authority had to respond to the BBC’s plan to erect a transmission mast on North Hessary Tor at Princetown. On the eve of confirmation, Northumberland National Park faced a challenge at least as significant. Northumberland County Council, Tynemouth Corporation and Newcastle and Gateshead Water Company, acting together, proposed the construction of an impounding reservoir in the Coquet Valley to help regulate the volume of water available for extraction downstream. They looked to dam the valley five miles upstream of Harbottle in order to flood some three miles of Coquetdale as far as Carshope. The existing road would be submerged, as would Windyhaugh Farm and the small hamlet of Barrowburn.

Surprisingly, the surviving archival material leaves no trace of Dower’s involvement in the conflict, but her previous stance on the military’s presence in the valley makes it impossible to imagine she did not have a view. Initial reports prepared for the commission indicate that it believed new infrastructure could be an improvement on existing agricultural structures and landscapes. The loss of the hamlet and the farm would remove ‘a number of existing disfigurements’, including some ‘very unsightly’ buildings, and the commission was unconcerned by the recommendation that the submerged road be replaced by developing Clennel Street, then a bridleway, or the loss of moorland judged to be low quality agricultural land.98 Rather than lodge an objection, the commission supplied the county council with practical suggestions. A good landscape architect, among other design experts, was needed; local stone should be used in the construction of the dam; the 36-inch pipe, which would run the length of the Coquet, should be buried or concealed; the effect on Usway Burn should be investigated; the siting of the filtration works should be looked at again; and access should be taken into account.99 The county council gave provisional approval to the scheme, and it would be considered at the first meeting of the new National Park Planning Committee on 19 October 1956.

In the event, the committee proved less supine than the commission, proving that national park designation could disrupt the plans of developers. In the new year the scheme was in abeyance and the promotors investigated extracting water nearer the mouth of the Coquet. Claud Bicknell of the CPRE now raised fresh concerns. The new scheme required a small reservoir upstream, once again threatening the valley of Grasslees Burn. Bicknell’s reading of the valley geography led him to conclude that it would be flooded from somewhere near Hepple Woodside to Billsmoor Park. A decade after the public inquiry ensured that the military could not make use of the valley, Bicknell again had to make the case for its importance. It was ‘not a typical Cheviot Valley’, he wrote to the county council.

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