There haven’t been many positives in all this business over the years, but seeing Blackhill Quarry on Woodbury Common in the East Devon AONB now being restored back to nature, removing 100s of HGVs each day from unsuitable roads, is certainly one of them.
Blackhill has been quarried since the early 1930s. Aggregate Industries had desperately wanted to continue using the site, but, when it recently applied to import and process material from Straitgate Farm, it could neither demonstrate the ‘exceptional circumstances’ demanded by the NPPF for major development in an AONB, nor that nitrate-rich material from farmland would not harm habitats on the Pebblebed Heaths.
However, it was almost 20 years ago that the wheels of Blackhill's closure were first set in motion - as we posted in If mobile processing plant can do it all, was the Blackhill extension secured on a lie?:
Modification orders were served on AI to restrict quarrying at Blackhill Quarry in 1999, following the SPA and SAC European nature conservation designations on Woodbury Common; £6 million pounds was paid out in compensation as a result. Nevertheless, AI went on to secure permission to quarry an extension to the site in 2002, and later to process material from Venn Ottery until 2016.
Readers may remember that AI’s first planning application for Straitgate not only claimed that if Blackhill was not used for processing it "would severely restrict the output and product range", but also that Blackhill could not be restored without the silt generated from Straitgate:
In the absence of this development the existing lagoon will remain as a deep, steep sided, angular lagoon, which is incongruous within the wider landscape setting of the AONB and Pebblebed Heaths. 4.1
The claim was of course nonsense, as we argued at the time.
AI claimed much the same thing again for its application some months later to import material from Hillhead into Blackhill:
Should materials not be permitted to be imported to the site, this could potentially result in the processing plant at Blackhill Quarry otherwise remaining under-utilised for the remainder of the planning permission and the permitted restoration not being able to be completed.
Again, nonsense; as we argued at the time.
And to prove as much, there are now new signs up at Blackhill:
So, fancy that. Despite AI’s earlier protestations, restoration "as required by the approved restoration scheme… to allow the site to blend into the wider landscape" is possible after all - even when "no material will be imported into the site". It’s another example of how very little of AI’s planning applications can be taken at face value.
Of course, if no material is now to be "taken off site", you may wonder what will happen to the thousands of tonnes of processed material in these stockpiles.
With AI knowing that these areas had to be restored by the end of this year, it’s surprising that these stockpiles are still in place - when the company apparently sells upwards of 300,000 tonnes of sand and gravel in Devon a year. Now it looks like extraction, haulage and processing of this material was wasted, and it will go back into the ground, requiring some other resource to be dug up to replace it.
As for the processing plant, we posted in July that there was still no sign of Blackhill plant coming down, and that is still the case. This area must also be restored by the end of the year.
