Quiz of the week: what connects The collapse of the Northern Ireland Assembly, John Keats and The Large Gold Case-bearer?
The answer lies in these pictures.
Provisional IRA wall mural, Kent (c) Miles King
PIRA village back gardens full of Dyer’s Greenweed (c) Miles King
Yes, it’s Lodge Hill on the Hoo Peninsula in Kent.
What are the connections? The photos show Lodge Hill’s “PIRA village”. PIRA stands for the Provisional IRA and, as the second photo shows, the Army went to great lengths to make the village as realistic as possible for the soldiers training to defuse booby traps, including painting a wall mural; the kind you will still see in Belfast today. The story is that the Provisional IRA are in action again, causing the collapse of the Northern Ireland Assembly.
Keats wrote Ode to a Nightingale, and despite it being a hot day in July when I visited with author Julian Hoffman, we were still granted a short burst of Nightingale song, from within a thicket created specifically to train soldiers in mine detection.
The Large Gold Case-bearer is a very rare micro-moth, found almost always on Dyer’s Greenweed, a low shrub now so threatened with extinction in England that it is listed on the Red Data List. In the Lodge Hill PIRA village, Dyer’s Greenweed was the main plant of the back lawns, which havent been mown by their phantom inhabitants for quite a few years.
Land Securities, who were so keen to promote the development of this unique site into a new town, walked away from it in the Summer, returning it to its owners the Ministry of Defence. One can only assume that is because they think the chances of the development going ahead are zero. Press reports today suggest they have suffered an £11M loss.
Changes at the top of Medway Council may also swing in favour of Lodge Hill being saved: Rodney Chambers, who was almost obsessively enthusiastic about developing Lodge Hill, is no longer leader. He was replaced after the council elections with new leader Alan Jarrett. Jarrett is very keen on his birds: he is chairman of the British Assocation of Shooting and Conservation, chair of the Kent Wildfowlers and chair of a local Kent conservation charity, the Wildspace Fund, which purchases land for bird conservation in Kent.
Now I’m not suggesting that Jarrett gets the Wildspace Fund to purchase Lodge Hill so it can shoot the Nightingales, though I imagine some of his chums on the Council might encourage him to do that.
But it does seem as though Medway may now have a Leader who recognises the importance of nature to his constituents. One of Jarrett’s fellow tory councillors is new Medway MP Kelly Tolhurst (yes she is a Councillor and an MP). Tolhurst is adamantly against the Lodge Hill development.
Preparations for the Public Inquiry into the proposed development continue, costing charities like RSPB and Kent Wildlife Trust a lot of money, which could be put to much better use.
While the MoD might cling onto a false hope they can sell Lodge Hill at development value, it’s high time Medway announced that it was abandoning plans for housing at Lodge Hill and that they will not be wasting council tax payer’s money in fighting the Inquiry.
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Ah. Obviously!
There is another vague, and not very lengthy, connection between Ulster and John Keats:
“9th July [1818] We stopped very little in Ireland and that you may not have leisured to marvel at our speedy return to Port Patrick. I will tell you that is it as dear living in Ireland as at the Hummums – thrice the expence of Scotland – it would have cost us £15 before our return – Moreover we found those 48 Miles [to the Giant’s Causeway] to be irish ones which reach to 70 english – So having walked to Belfast one day and back to Donoghadee the next we left Ireland with a fair breeze.”
John Keats
It’s hard to tell if direct rule or home rule for Medway would be better for nightingales; or, indeed, imposed local power-sharing or rule from Paris?!
In the early 1990s I saw some goalposts at a British Army base in Cyprus painted red, white and blue on one side of the field and green, white and orange on the opposing side. Brought me out of my holiday reverie and back home with a bump.- already somewhat unsettled by the Northern Cyprus and Republic of Cyprus parallel.
thanks Dave. News today of another speech by Cameron signalling plans to sell of “surplus” MoD land with planning permission already granted, will probably not apply to Lodge Hill (which already has planning permission, albeit called-in.) Developing it for housing may indeed require Medway to succumb to Direct Rule from Westminster.
“The North of England”, says the Telegraph, vaguely; though at least it specified England. I wonder was that at today’s event where he also sought to curry favour with Lancashire voters? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-34222801
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