Woodland to waste land

A Forestry Commission plan to turn a Norfolk wood into Europe's biggest gravel and landfill site is meeting fierce opposition

You can just see the gently undulating central Norfolk landscape from the ancient beech and oak trees in Bintree wood: huge arable fields bordered by thorn hedges and Scots pines, scattered flint villages, isolated church spires, and glinting chalk streams. But it's hard to imagine that the 120-hectare wood carpeted in russet autumn leaves could soon be part of one of the biggest gravel and landfill works in Europe.

Proposals by the government's Forestry Commission, which owns Bintree, in partnership with the building materials company Ennstone Johnstone, include digging up the entire wood to extract the 3m tonnes of sand and gravel the county needs each year for roads and homes.

Bintree wood, in the Breckland district near Dereham, would become an industrial complex that includes asphalt and concrete batching plants, a processing works, a recycling plant, a waste recycling centre and a landfill site. The whole operation would be twice the size of the UK's current largest gravel pit at Brogborough in Bedfordshire. In all, it could yield 14m tonnes of minerals and last up to 50 years.

The proposals have met fierce opposition from people who value the wood as a landmark and amenity. "Bintree is an area of real beauty," says Keith Simpson, MP for Mid-Norfolk. "I am amazed that it should be considered as a site for a quarry."


Retired agricultural workers Donny and Joan Bell have lived in the wood at the centre of the proposed site since 1952. "It's stressful," says Joan Bell. "This is the best wood to walk in for miles around. Everyone says that, there's something different to see every day. In summer they even come from Norwich to picnic."

"The sheer scale and breadth of these proposals is frightening people," says Richard Haywood, the Save Bintree Wood (SBW) campaign coordinator. He argues that the woodland, bought by the government in 1933 from the Earl of Leicester, has been valued by local people for generations, and to replace it with an industrial area of such epic proportions flies in the face of global warming. "It threatens to blight the whole of central Norfolk. The traffic alone would mean a 20-tonne truck leaving the site every two minutes, trundling through quiet villages to begin a 20-mile trip to Norwich."

Fellow campaigner Simon Gilbert says: "In terms of impact on the villages and people around here, this is like digging up a local park in a city. We are surrounded by agricultural land and crops; the wood provides a place for walking, cycling, running and horse riding."

But Adrian Gunson, the Norfolk county council cabinet member for planning and transportation disagrees. "I'm not surprised people do not want them in their area, but if Norfolk is to build all these new houses [that the government wants] then we need gravel."

SBW says it "naively believed" in the Forestry Commission's commitment to climate change. "It sounds like a bad joke," the campaigning group adds. "How can the Forestry Commission preach in international conferences to developing countries to stop destroying forests in order to feed their people when they propose to destroy this wood just to balance their books?"

In a letter to the campaigners, Lord Clark of Windermere, chairman of the Forestry Commission, says: "Synergy with other government policies is a key part of the overall strategy for managing England's forests. This means that there is justification for any woodland where there are mineral reserves being considered in the initial stages of any county minerals plan."

Clark says that the issue should be viewed on an "international scale". "There is a significant difference between the destruction of virgin forest that we see in some countries and the removal of recently established plantation. There has been mineral extraction on the public forest estate for many years, and this can include deforestation, so the inclusion of Forestry Commission woodland in a minerals waste plan is nothing new. Woodland cannot be isolated from the wider demands of society and there are occasions when it has to be considered for an alternative use."

But campaigners say this argument has been debunked by Simon Hodgson, chief executive of the Forestry Commission. In April he said that after "further discussions with Norfolk county council, we have concluded that there are very adequate reserves in Norfolk to meet the needs of the county for the period up to 2026 without the need to include Forestry Commission land which, as we all recognise, carries high environmental constraints."

At a height of 46 metres in a flat landscape, the development would impact on a wide area. Chris Langford, chairman of Bintree parish council, warns that the visual impact and constant drone and clanking would be devastating.

Norfolk county council will decide in the new year whether to put Bintree on a list of its "preferred" sites for mining and extracting gravel. If it does, the Forestry Commission would then have to apply for planning permission, and this could lead to a public inquiry.

Mark Thornycroft, head of estates at the Forestry Commission, stressed that no decisison had been made. "We will always try to work any commercial opportunity in balance with our wider environmental objectives ... But we have to be aware of the potential of the estate to fund the environmental work that's done elsewhere."

But however long it takes, the opposition is not going to go away. "We will not let up until we know for sure that this threat is gone," Hayward says.