A new action group has been started in the villages of Scholes and Thorpe Hesley to prevent the building of a new road and 600 houses and to protest at the selling of common land. Their site is  http://www.scholesvillage.org/stag/homepage.htm

Entries in an ongoing online record show quite clearly that the village is flooded because of the water runoff from the field above, and it is the same runoff that is damaging the Ancient Woodlands and the Ancient Monument they contain. It supports the point I have been making at  http://www.holisticfraternity.co.uk since 1991, which is that the filling in of the drainage culverts on the field near to Keppel's column is damaging surrounding areas. This record can be accessed from a link to their organisation from my front page.

But this is just a part of a wider plan to develop the area and eventually take motorway traffic up to Thorpe Hesley junction on a new and wider road.

Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council create the illusion of conserving the woodlands yet at the same time actually cause it's destruction. The only reason that the area around Keppels is now a field is due to clearance of woodland there at the end of WW2, prisones of war were employed to take surface coal, then replace the soil. Trees planted didn't do well because of the removal of larger trees that had previously pumped gallons of water from the ground. So to combat the rising water table, the culverts were dug, they are channels cut into the ground and lined with concrete. The trees have grown back a little since then only to be cleared, the wild flowers and grasses mown, wetland created complete with bullrushes growing out of pebble-filled culverts, and cattle grazed behing a heavy fence. There is a group lead by a member of the council called Friends of Keppel's Field" who promote the false illusion that it is a natural grassland while the grassland manager employed by RMBC has said that he welcomes the heather that has seeded by wind blown from the moors and intends to reove the young oaks that have appeared.

The end result and outcome that these people are anticipating is obviously to dry out the land below at Thorpe Hesley, where they once wanted to build an industrial estate on greenbelt land. Once dry it will be more suitable for building the 1,200 houses refused planning permission a couple of years ago, the newly proposed 600 houses and also the road that they want to expand the town outwards, and feed traffic along a duel carriageway up to the motorway roundabout at Thorpe Hesley.

This is at the cost of losing two idyllic historic villages, beautiful Ancient Woodland with groves of oak trees, also an Ancient Monument that is a double ditch oval earthwork from at the latest the Mid Iron Age, and possibly much older.