Two more novel uses for old quarries - a 15MW solar energy 'farm' with 62500 panels, and a round-the-clock testing ground for articulated dump trucks. Not perhaps the restoration plans that local people had either hoped for or expected. Not farmland. Not nature trails. But Aggregate Industries is not a charity. If it quarried Straitgate, who could blame it for wanting to persuade DCC in the future that the county no longer needed the woodland clearing with picnic area, or footpaths with education boards, detailed on the imaginative and colourful plans used to win permission way back in 2014. Who could blame it for arguing that what Ottery really needed was, for example, an aggregate recycling centre on the old Straitgate Quarry site? Would the company listen to local people? Did it listen to "Objectors [who] had pleaded to AI to abandon its [78 metre] wind turbine proposals for Hulands Quarry"?
