Community Victory

Buckfastleigh Wins Campaign to Stop Quarry Dump Site

 

On 1st March 2012 the Parish Poll took place on the planning application to allow Whitecleave Quarry in Buckfastleigh to be used for the processing of ash from the proposed Plymouth waste incinerator. Almost 50% of electorate voted - probably the largest Parish Poll percentage turnout in history! Results:

95% SAY NO to Waste dump at Whitecleave Quarry

 Parish Poll Landslide Result - NO: 1367   YES: 73

After a 4 hour debate on 25th April 2012, Devon County Council planners voted to turn the application down. None of this would have been possible without the Buckfastleigh Community Forum. In particular, Forum co-chairs Neil Smith and Julia Walton have worked tirelessly with professionalism and passion to turn this once 'done deal' around. They brought together residents, environmental organisations, Dartmoor National Park, the Parish Council and more, and deserve national recognition for their efforts. The victory proves that people care deeply about their environment and mobilise around significant issues.

Buckfastleigh c.1830

Objections to the quarry are:-

 
1. Geography 

• Whitecleaves Quarry is situated between two planning authorities and is close to the very heart of the town. 
• The site is adjacent to residential property which already suffers from noise and air pollution from the A38. 
• Such a development would adversely affect local amenity. 
• This application would have a significantly negative impact on the socio-economic status of the town. 
• There would be a detrimental effect on the town‟s tourism which benefits from 8 significant local attractions and provides significant employment for local people. We would reiterate
  that a statutory consultant for the new Teignbridge District Council Plan for 2011 – 2015 which tackles the need for our community and environment and gives new priority and guidelines for economic prosperity, quality, environment and wellbeing. 
• The site is situated only a few feet from the boundary of Dartmoor National Park Authority. 
• We are aware that other developments of this type are situated on established industrial sites with good infrastructure. We would question as to why is it necessary for this development to be sited within a residential rural town on the edge of a National Park and borders the South Hams Area of Conservation. 
• Buckfastleigh lies within a stunning valley that suffers from pollution from the A38 which is already exacerbated under certain meteorological conditions.

 
2. Site Context 

• The Town Council has studied the Review of Old Mineral Permissions (ROMP) and Mineral Policy for Devon and searched through our records and we have no sight of a planning application from Gilpins that changes the use of Whitecleaves Quarry to a waste development facility. 
• ROMP conditions from 2002 with respect to Whitecleaves Quarry explicitly state that “No materials (or refuse or waste) for the purpose of storage, processing or resale shall be imported in to the site;” this is specifically in order to “prevent the unnecessary increase in traffic attracted to the site in the interest of local amenity and highways safety.” We have not been provided with any evidence that these conditions have been revoked. 
• Although we are aware that there is a quarry licence until 2042, the Minerals Policy states it was not commercially viable to continue with quarrying. Blasting dolerite to fill a void can not be classed as quarrying. We also understand that there is no commercial market for dolerite. 
• We have had sight of the response to this application by Dartmoor National Park Authority and are in full agreement with the comments made with respect to site arrangement and mitigation.

 
3. Habitats and Wildlife 

• Members are in full agreement with Dartmoor National Park Authority and Natural England regarding the potential impact on habitats and wildlife in this area. 
• It should be noted that we are fortunate to have a variety of protected species living in the vicinity of the quarry. This proposal contravenes the protection afforded by current legislation and the legality of disturbing the established habitat of protected species should be questioned.

4. Site Access and Impact on Road Safety 

• There will be a significant increase of movement from HGVs in and out of this site which is accessed from a residential road. 
• We are very concerned for the safety of cyclists, pedestrians and other road users. 
• There will be a substantial increase in the number of HGVs from when Hansons were quarrying. Since then there has been further residential development which in itself generates more traffic. 
• We are extremely concerned that this will effectively split community cohesion between the east and west of the town. 
• The A38 was constructed in the early 1970‟s when nationally there was a significantly lower level of traffic volume and movement. We have grave concerns that the stability and structural integrity of this road and the viaduct adjacent to the quarry site will be severely compromised by the impact of blasting.

 
5. Site Activity
After carefully considering this application there is a lot of vague statements regarding the following:-

• The classification of Incinerator Bottom Ash toxic or non toxic
• The regularity of samplin
•  The average number of lorry trips“minor impact or little significance” which does not take into account cumulative effect
•  Lack of accurate information concerning the drainage system currently in the quarry
•  Lack of information regarding dust suppression measures, we do not believe that the mitigating measures for dust suppression is robust enough.

 
6. Environmental Impact
a) Contamination – Land and Water Quality 

• The Dean Burn water course has tested in the past as having water quality „A‟ as classified through the Environment Agency General Quality Assessment Process. 
• The list of pollution incidents of the Dean Burn applies to the 1990s. 
• The indicative drainage layout diagram shows water running into an existing open drainage ditch. 
• There is no diagram of the existing drainage system within the quarry.

 
b) Air Quality 

• The proposed development is likely to lead to visible emissions of dust as stated 12.3.13 occurring at the source on a regular basis, due to the number of potentially dust generated activities being undertaken across the site. The Town Council are concerned that air quality will not be continually monitored even if all mitigating proposals are put in place because the risk is deemed low.

 
c) Noise Pollution 

• It is difficult to get an accurate figure for HGV movement on Strode Road from the planning application, but it is estimated at 100 lorries per day. There is also the increase of traffic on the A38 from other planned waste facilities throughout Devon and Cornwall.The application states that dolerite will be blasted from inside the quarry to fill the void and level the site in preparation for the Incinerated Bottom Ash facility. We believe this spur of rock within the quarry with tree screening appears to protect Buckfastleigh from excessive noise levels, particularly as there will be a mobile crusher inside the quarry and other sound generating equipment.

South Devon’s Thoroughly Modern Patron[esses]

During the Interwar years South Devon enjoyed the patronage of two American heiresses: Dorothy Elmhirst (née Whitney) and Peggy Guggenheim.  The historic estates they inhabited became sites of experimentation, creativity and subversion. The larger and  famous project was Dartington Hall. Less well-known is activity that took place over two consecutive summers at Hayford Hall on Dartmoor.

Dorothy Whitney

Dorothy Payne Whitney Straight Elmhirst (1887–1968) was born in Washington DC and at 17 inherited a fortune following the death of her businessman and philanthropist father, William C. Whitney. Over her life time Dorothy was a pioneer in progressive education and benefactor of the arts, feminist, and pacifist causes as well as social and labour reform. She lent financial support to alternative education and scholarly research at Cornell University, where she met her second husband Leonard Elmhirst. Leonard was inspired by a long association with Rabindranath Tagore's Shantiniketan, where Tagore was trying to introduce  a radical curricula and rural reconstruction into a tribal community. Dorothy and Leonard set out on a similar goal for the depressed agricultural economy in rural England by resurrecting the derelict 14th century Dartington Estate as a site for the arts, experimental land management, rural skills and crafts and education. Dartington of the 1920s and ‘30s is described as a blend of influences: Ascona, Bloomsbury, Summerhill, the Bauhaus and Jung, plus Owen and Ruskin without the egalitarian socialism but with the Indian influences of Tagore and Narayan V.Tilak relating to community and spirituality.

Dartington Hall in state of dilapidation when the Elmhirsts moved there in 1925, DHT Archives

Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst at Dartington Hall, 1967 DHT Archives

Peggy Guggenheim by Man Ray, 1924

Eight miles from Dartington on Buckfastleigh Moor is Hayford Hall. Under the patronage of Peggy Guggenheim the Hall inspired modernist experiments of a more anarchic nature. Peggy (1898-1979) inherited part of the Guggenheim fortune aged 21 but was keen to differentiate herself from her socialite circles from a young age. At 22 she found a job at an avant-garde bookshop, The Sunwise Turn on 44th Street and began her love-affair with bohemian art, spending most of the following two decades in Paris. During the summers of 1932 and 1933 Guggenheim rented Hayford Hall and hosted a literary salon with her British partner John Holms; Djuna Barnes, who wrote her masterpiece Nightwood at Hayford; Antonia White, British author best known for her convent novel Frost in May; and Emily Coleman, whose novel The Shutter of Snow was based on her own experiences of madness and institutionalization. A collection of essays about the two summers was published in 2005 entitled Hayford Hall: Hangovers, Erotics, and Modernist Aesthetics. Editors of the collection, Podnieks and Chait suggest that a specifically female kind of lived modernism emerged at Hayford Hall. They argue that the writers ‘challenged the sexual, textual, and spiritual mores of the day, both in life and on the page’.

 Hayford hall, Dartmoor

I discovered this part of Hayford Hall's history when my horse started living at the next-door farm. I was drawn to estate because of the interplay between exposure and enclosure as Moor mingles with shaded tracks and bluebell woods. Similarly, Hayford Hall: Hangovers... points to a sense of the tamed and the intractable as one of the attractions of the estate to Guggenheim and Holms*.  Coleman described Hayford as 'a dream place, a lovely, heavenly poetic garden, a Paradise, far from nowhere, deep in the trees beneath the moor'.  However, the landscape delivered tragedy as well as played muse. Whilst pony riding on Dartmoor Holms fell and fractured his wrist. Despite being reset in Totnes, the bones failed to realign and the following year he was advised to have corrective surgery. Holms, a heavy drinker died whilst under anaesthetic. Peggy described him as the great love of her life from whose death she never fully recovered.

Seventy years on, the legacy of the modernist enterprises in South Devon is mottled. On the surface, the scope and scale of the experiments can hardly be compared: one a wildish playground for a small literati; the other an established arts destination on a 1200acre estate. Today, however, Dartington Hall estate is more up-market business park than radical enclave. Since the Elmhirsts died the Trust has been addled by scandal and management troubles.  Bit by bit, it has been argued, the art has been taken out of Dartington. Protestors at the close of Dartington College of Arts in 2010 made the case when they removed the letters "a-r-t" from local Dartington road signs. Dartington Hall School declined after a drunken student fell to her death from a boarding house window, and pictures of the head master were found in a porn magazine. The school closed in 1987 and the Foxhole building will soon be an old people's home entitled 'The Abundant Life Project'. In the recent budget cuts, the summer music school lost its entire £600,000 grant from the Arts Council. The cottage industries: Dartington Glass, Tweed Mill and Pottery closed or moved and now trades a pricey shopping centre.  Perhaps most symbolic of the Trust’s departure from its original mandate is the sale of its art collection. In the 2010, 12 paintings by Tagore sold for £1.4 million at Sotheby’s, and key works by Ben Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Alfred Wallis will soon go under the hammer. By contrast, the legacy of the art and lived experiences at Hayford Hall has only recently started to receive critical treatment. In particular, the one completed piece, Nightwood is considered a powerful and complex work, and one central to the wider project of reassessing ‘minor modernists’.

I cannot find documentary evidence that Guggenheim and Elmhirst corroborated during their time in Devon in the early ‘30s.  However, it is hard to imagine that the millionaire daughters of two influential American families/foundations were unaware of each other’s presence in a quiet corner of England. Under the patronage of two visionary women, South Devon's natural and built environments gave rise to experiments in art and living that are yet to be fully appreciated.

*Recently Hayford Hall has come under renewed scrutiny for providing inspiration for Conan-Doyle’s Baskerville Hall (corrected as being Brook Manor a few miles down the road).  Owners of Hayford Hall have played on such speculation by erecting a pair of Great Danes at their gateway, which on close inspection prove to be tombstones to pets.

 

Hayford Hall: Hangovers, Erotics, and Modernist Aesthetics, Eds. E. Podnieks and S. Chait, 2005

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes

T.S Eliot raved about the novel Nightwood (1936) (and edited and published it), which is not particularly surprising given that its author, Djuna Barnes (1892 – 1982) credited Eliot with providing much of the stylistic inspiration. Nightwood is a mysterious treat. To read it is akin to eating something delicious but never finding out the key ingredients; a sensation (slightly cloying) rather than a cognitive exercise.  Obsessive love is sketched with feverish tension. Themes and characters are regurgitated and recycled and at the end (I read it in one sitting) I felt a bit sick. This was not because I was shocked by its transgressions; the bestiality or transvestism but because it replayed somatic memories of my own impossible attachments. I hadn’t been physically stirred by a book for years.

As part of the current project to resurrect ‘minor modernists’ from obscurity (crudely differentiated from the heavy-weights such as Eliot, Woolf and Joyce) Barnes is currently enjoying great popularity.  An initiative supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and based at Birkbeck College, University of London includes a forum and seminar series dedicated to Barnes and the First International Djuna Barnes Conference is scheduled for this Autumn.  As well as write, Barnes produced some beautiful, Beardsley-esque illustrations (her yin to his inflated yang!).

I discovered Nightwood when I started spending time at the farm next-door to the house where it was written. I often peer through the hedge into Hayford Hall's garden and imagine the intrigue and erotic play that provided the exterior landscape to this most singular of texts.

 Djuna Barnes by Berenice Abbott,1920s

Solita Solano and Djuna Barnes in Paris

Djuna Barnes Bibliography :

• The Book of Repulsive Women: 8 Rhythms and 5 Drawings (1915)
• A Book (1923) – revised versions published as:
  • A Night Among the Horses (1929)
  • Spillway (1962)
• Ryder (1928)
• Ladies Almanack (1928)
• Nightwood (1936)
• The Antiphon (1958)
• Selected Works (1962) – Spillway, Nightwood, and a revised version of The Antiphon
• Vagaries Malicieux: Two Stories (1974) – unauthorized publication
• Creatures in an Alphabet (1982)
• Smoke and Other Early Stories (1982)
• I Could Never Be Lonely without a Husband: Interviews by Djuna Barnes (1987) – ed. A. Barry
• New York (1989) – journalism
• At the Roots of the Stars: The Short Plays (1995)
• Collected Stories of Djuna Barnes (1996)
• Poe's Mother: Selected Drawings (1996) – ed. and with an introduction by Douglas Messerli
• Discanto, poesie 1911–1982, Roma, Edizione del Giano, 2004 a cura di Maura Del Serra
• Collected Poems: With Notes Toward the Memoirs (2005) – ed. Phillip Herring and Osias Stutman

 

'Well of the Saints', 1917 by Djuna Barnes in Poe's Mother: Selected Drawings of Djuna Barnes, ed. Douglas Messerli

Illustration by Djuna Barnes

Illustration by Djuna Barnes

 

Design for Death by Barbara Jones

Design for Death by Barbara Jones, 1967

"-Whatever's that?

-A sheep's skull.

-Fancy having a skull about.

-You've got one in your own head.

-Morbid, I call it.

  Death is a morbid subject only so far as, yes, mori is 'to die' in Latin and so death is rightly morbid, but for the last century morbid has meant unhealthy, and this death can hardly be said to be."

Design for Death, 1967, Pg. 13

On The Corpse:

"The most interesting Roman funeral custom was that of using wax masks, careful portraits of ancestors used only for funerals and worn by actors who mimed their welcome to the new dead.  He himself was represented by an actor chosen to look as like him as possible, briefed in his mannerisms and wearing a mask of him that was afterwards out away to join the ancestors at the next funeral."

Design for Death, 1967, Pg. 22

"The skull has always been top bone; it holds the brain, important in most cultures, it has a neat shape, and it looks human, except that its eyes are bigger and it laughs all the time, very sexy."

Design for Death, 1967, Pg. 27

On The Coffin:

"...Gold-plated coffins are dull besides the coffins of Bali, where corpses are burnt in carved animals.  These accord with caste; half-elephant, half-fish for conman man..a deer for a soldier, a winged lion for a king or a very holy priest, a cow for a noblewoman and a bull for a nobleman.  They are made by specialist craftsmen from hollow trees with a lid in the back for the body."

Design for Death, 1967, Pg. 91

Epitaphs to Pets:

"'PIP' AS SHE HAD LIVED - DRINKING TEA BLESS HER. 

IN MEMORY OF SUSAN OUR WEE DARLING WOOLLY MONKEY.

HITLER, IN MEMORY OF A GOOD AND FAITHFUL PAL"

Design for Death, 1967, Pg. 151

On The Procession:

Wellington, London 1852.  Probably the most splendid funeral ever staged in Europe, centred on an enormous car made from cannon captured by the Duke, melted by a hundred men in six foundries...In the procession was every military splendour, the Duke's horse with reversed boots in the stirrups."

Design for Death, 1967, Pg. 171

"Where death gets you Sin-eating

...In Britain, especially Wales, sin-eating by a paid individual continued into the nineteenth century.  The sin-eater was an outcast who took upon himself the sins of the dead. Bread and beer and sixpence were handed to him across the corpse and he ate and drank and went away and the platter and beaker were burned."

Design for Death, 1967, Pg. 261

"Where death gets you doing something really worth while about taxidermy

Not everyone is satisfied with just stuffing animals or skinning them and then keeping them about the place plain.  Some men have stuffed them as the materials for tableaux-morts, groups of small animals stuffed on their hind legs, dressed and posed as people...Walter Potter (1835-1918) was an enthusiastic taxidermist who was inspired by a sister's book of nursery rhymes...Rabbits' Village School (48 little scholars)...The Guinea Pigs' Cricket Match."

Design for Death, 1967, Pg. 268-70

Rabbits' Village School (image from http://www.victoriangothic.org/the-curious-taxidermy-of-walter-potter/)

On Necrophilia:

"Beyond the enjoyment of the good works of death lies necrophilia.  It must be a difficult passion to satisfy; very few people admit to the liberal sentiments of Henri Blot, who dug up an eighteen-year-old ballet dancer at St Ouen in 1886.  He got away with that one but was caught with his next corpse.  At his trial he said, "What do you want? everyone has his taste, mine is for the corpse" [my translation].  So, because it is probably the most carefully concealed of all aberrations there are no publicly known observances or special artefacts for necrophilia."

Design for Death, 1967, Pg. 278

Women in Farming, Dartmoor

Aune Head Arts (AHA) project, Women in Farming 2006-8 grew out of Focus on Farmers.  Six women artists: Jennie Hayes, Tot Foster, Anthea Nicholson, Louise Evans, Maddy Pethick and Penny Klepuszewska explored the life and work of three women hill farmers on Dartmoor.  During the project the artists recorded their experiences of life on a farm.  The intent was not only to explore farming practice, but to look at the people themselves, and the place in which they live and work.  The artists shadowed the farmers on their daily routines, on and off the farm – caring for livestock, haymaking, attending livestock sales, running errands, meeting with DNP and Defra officials, completing paperwork, etc. 

Report

Image by Jennie Hayes

Image by Jennie Hayes

Image by Jennie Hayes

Since 1997 Aune Head Arts has blazed a trail in contemporary art-making with and alongside rural communities, re-defining a form of engaged arts practice that works with and alongside communities in rural places, led by an array of professional artists drawn from all corners of the UK.

We work with artists, farmers, health workers, environmentalists, educationalists, community leaders, young people, older people, dancers, fun lovers, movers and shakers, friends, acquaintances, shop workers, land workers, milkers, tailors, media geeks, bookish freaks, workers, players, dragon slayers, enquirers, talkers, listeners, lookers, makers, virtual sharers, mates, strangers, paper pushers, chaos makers, out of breathers, deeply doubters…pretty much anyone really.

We believe the arts are enriching for our health, our environment our society and our selves; that everyone is capable of creative expression, and that collaboration between contemporary artists and communities can provide work which is exciting, challenging, stimulating, and life-changing.

We support our work through funding from a wide variety of arts and non-arts funders, including Arts Council England and many of the UK’s leading foundations.  The Paul Hamlyn Foundation said that our Walk your Ears! schools project was “among the most interesting work we have supported, and The Baring Foundation noted, in awarding us support for our EVA project that ‘the Trustees were particularly please with the work you have done in the past with isolated older people, and felt that Aune Head Arts could make a strong contribution to the Foundation’s goals of supporting older people.”   In a recent assessment, Arts Council England said that AHA has “an ability to reach little-engaged and unengaged audiences through partnership working with a variety of non-arts 
 organisations”.






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Dominion by Angela Cockayne

 Link to site

Dominion

 

Fluke Board

'Hands of God'

No Suicides Permitted Here

Ahab's Brides

Boat of Bones

Bone Texts

Clawgirl

Believe it can be done

Weapons of mass extinction

Hubwhal

I must stop making things

Ishmael's Raft

Ishmael's Jacket

Jaw Stock

Sleeping Sperm Whales

Pulpit

Last Pipe

Museum of Extinction

Weapons of Mass Extinction

Dead Men Don't Bite

Fur Whale

Sharkfin Cola

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