Rail plans ‘environmental Armageddon’ says farmer
CHARITY OUTLINES CONCERNS FOR NATURE AND WILDLIFE
A NUMBER of concerns have been raised over plans to build a railway line over nature-rich farmland in Cambridgeshire.
The Countryside Regeneration Trust (CRT), who own Lark Rise Farm near Comberton, described it as “a crime against the countryside” in an open letter to East West Rail whose preferred route for the £5 billion railway line was announced in May 2023.
It hopes to connect the UK’s two major university cities, Oxford and Cambridge, and provide faster, reliable and more affordable public transport.
In the letter, the CRT highlighted the potential impact on the environment, the route alignment, and the quality of the ecological surveys.
They also called for East West Rail to rethink its proposal for the southern route through the county.
Vince Lea, conservation officer for the Countryside Regeneration Trust, said that the route was likely to have a negative effect on the county’s countryside. He added that there were many concerns about the surveys conducted on the land, including the amount of time they had to wait for the results. He said: “It’s a big swathe of the countryside that they’re planning to take out and its going to have quite a big impact on the visual area, particularly Hardwick Wood.
“Not long ago, you could see one house from there, but now you’ll see houses all around it and soon a railway line as well, so it will certainly disturb the peace of that idyllic nature and woodland and others like it.
“I think they’ve chosen a particularly awful route as they’re picking out all the best bits of the countryside they can find to loop around.
“Ironically, it crosses the course of the Victorian Oxford to Cambridge line which was dismantled in the 1960s and the longer it is, the more countryside it goes through.
“The biggest shock to me was seeing their water vole, otter and kingfisher survey data because that’s a group of species we’ve worked quite hard on over the last 15 years and on the Bourn Brook which is where the route is going to cross on our farmland. We’ve been doing lots of work to improve the conditions for those species and they didn’t actually survey the brook.
“According to their spreadsheet, they gave the exact co-ordinates of the start point where they surveyed it and it was 100m from the actual brook. They said they didn’t find any water voles or kingfishers, which is a real surprise because we know there are on the brook itself and if they bothered to carry on another 100m, they would’ve found some, I’m sure.”
Tim Scott has been the tenant farmer at Lark Rise Farm for 30 years.
He described the plans to build the East West Rail line over farmland as “environmental Armageddon” and said it was going to impact the lives of so many people in nearby villages, particularly those living in villages such as Comberton and Hardwick
They’re picking out all the best bits of countryside to loop around.
Vince Lea