Is there anybody left working at Aggregate Industries who has played a meaningful part in putting together the plans to quarry Straitgate Farm?
Of course, the company took so long to secure its permission – the best part of a decade, with site investigations, two applications, one refusal and a planning appeal – it’s not surprising that most of the actors behind the company’s scheme have exited stage left.
Aggregate Industries is now advertising for a new Quarry Manager for Hillhead Quarry. It is this person who would be responsible operationally for mineral working at Straitgate.
And what a responsibility, knowing what a convoluted, half-baked scheme this whole thing has become.
The advert says:
With an annual extraction of 350,000 tonnes and large projects in the planning phase, this position will offer you excellent growth in your career.
Let’s hope so for their sake – because what person would want to take on the Straitgate can-of-worms?
It was already clear last year, from the Council’s monitoring report, that the previous quarry manager for Hillhead, and before that for Blackhill, had chosen to hang up his boots.
Given his fervent support for the Straitgate dream, including at the DMC meeting that refused the application, you might have thought he’d be tempted to see his plans in action – to see the first HVO-filled HGVs pull off site, the first crossing of displaced cows across Ottery’s main road, the first use of livestock tracks across the working site, the first archaeological digs of Iron Age and Roman remains, the first daily groundwater interpolations, the first resulting revisions of the MWWT, the first ancient hedgerows grubbed up, the first veteran oaks felled, the first earth movers ripping up precious bmv farmland, the first birds on newly created water bodies – but perhaps he realised more than most just how difficult the whole thing would be to pull off.
Anyway, the cogs at Aggregate Industries have slowly turned and the position is now being advertised, for those mineral-minded readers who fancy a challenge.
Someone else will now be landed with the job of trying to make sense of it all at Straitgate, trying to get all the disparate parts to somehow hang together, trying to satisfy the profusion of constraints and conditions.
It won’t be an easy task. Remember, Aggregate Industries said whatever it needed to say to reach each stage of the planning process. It’s not clear that anyone ever stopped to think whether the whole thing was actually feasible.
