Consultations of a Kind

Early morning flossies (still in sleeping bags).

Back in December SWT sent round their proposed management plan inviting comments from those who had asked to see it, with a very tight deadline for people to respond. As doubtless anticipated, because of the timescale Christmas and New Year etc., not many would bother to send in comments especially as the ill mannered dismissive attitude of SWT staff was calculatedly off putting.

Nevertheless Blacka Blogger did contribute to a response albeit knowing there was very little point. The only point in fact was simply that if nobody did comment then SWT would come back at some future date with a statement to the effect that “there’s no excuse for people complaining. They should have spoken up before, when they had the chance”. We’ve been around long enough to know the style of management that is here being described.

Anyway there is nothing to suggest that there was much response from anyone else (apart from something from the archaeology person at PDNPA) so we might be able to claim that a large proportion of responses indicated opposition to, for example, cattle grazing and use of herbicides on the site.

When asked for SWT’s reaction to the comments made an email was received betraying fairly typical evidence of impatience and intemperance from the SWT officer responsible. I will try to give something of a flavour of this in posts to come. Some of the points had been discussed apparently at the latest SWT Blacka RAG meeting. This meeting we had not attended because we were excluded, having been given the choice of sending one representative if he/she undertook to swear some kind of binding oath to only speak about those things SWT allowed us to talk about (even though none of SWT’s cronies would be under the same injunction).

I intend to post excerpts from this peculiar correspondence in order to illustrate what is going on behind the scenes. Readers can then make up their own minds. Please let me know what you think.