Work stopped at Mainshill Wood — Crucial time at Mainshill Solidarity Camp

23rd Sep­tem­ber 2009
Yes­ter­day peo­ple from Main­shill Sol­i­dar­i­ty Camp took action to stop work on the pro­posed site for Scot­tish Coal’s open­cast mine. One per­son climbed up to the top of the drilling rig and stopped their work for five hours. The police arrived and the pro­test­er was told that she would be arrested…if only they could get her to come down. Even­tu­al­ly, after much head-scratch­ing, spe­cial­ist police climbers man­aged to remove her and she was arrest­ed, appear­ing in Lanark Sher­iff Court this morn­ing.

Over the past week, drilling equip­ment has been moved onto the site as well as har­vest­ing machines to log plan­ta­tion trees to make way for the coal exca­va­tion. This work has been delayed by peo­ple from the camp and mem­bers of the local com­mu­ni­ty approach­ing machin­ery and explain­ing the dev­as­tat­ing effects that the coal mine will bring — rang­ing from impacts on local com­mu­ni­ty health, to cli­mate and eco­log­i­cal dam­age. The work that is being done now is all in prepa­ra­tion for the open­cast and needs to be stopped.

This is a cru­cial time for this cam­paign to show Lord Home, the wealthy land own­er and Scot­tish Coal that we will not allow this project to go ahead.

This morn­ing, police escort­ed felling machines and Scot­tish Wood­land work­ers onto the site, remov­ing a bar­ri­cade and cut­ting down a tree defence that had blocked the track. The police’s involve­ment in pro­tect­ing the inter­ests of aris­to­crat Lord Home and pri­vate com­pa­ny Scot­tish Coal over the inter­ests of the local com­mu­ni­ty is very dis­ap­point­ing.

Now is a great time for peo­ple to come and join us at the camp and to take action to con­tin­ue our resis­tance.

For more infor­ma­tion on the ongo­ing cam­paign and news from the Pub­lic Meet­ing on Com­mu­ni­ty Health, which is tak­ing place tonight in Dou­glas, see http://mainshill.noflag.org.uk.