Another mass trespass to protect the peat bogs of midgy Yorkshire

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