When the Saxons first ventured up the stretch of water we know as the River Stour, the surrounding land was an unspoilt wilderness of fertile land and wild fowl.

The settlement that came to be known as Tattingstone was more successful than most, and by the time of the Doomsday book, where it was known as Tatituna, the natural beauty had been ‘despoiled’  by hovels built for shelter from the Siberian winds that followed the Saxons up the Shotton peninsular. Putting a roof over your head was known as progress and modernity in those far off times. A roof, running water, and plenteous wild food outside the door – what more could man want?

A more varied diet appears to have been the answer.  The water marshes were drained, wheat and barley planted, and by the 13th century Tattingstone was part of the manor of Stutton, and the men who held the land there had become wealthy with the new fangled bread on their table. In 1650 Robert Sparrow built Alton Hall, described as standing in ‘a pleasant acclivity about a mile north of the Stour, near the Holbrook rivulet’. On the rivulet he constructed two corn mills – he had gone into the manufacturing business and was selling flour. Progress and modernity again. 

There were no celebrities to demonstrate against this desecration of the natural beauty.  ’Housewives’ were only too glad to purchase their flour in a nifty sack – much better than bashing the wheat grains with a rock. If anyone moaned about the increase in carts hauling stone for the Hall it was not recorded. No doubt the dust and the noise as the stone masons chipped away did ruin the sound of the bird song – but it provided employment for the men folk too.

It was still a land of great beauty. By 1880, John South was farming 475 acres of ‘natural wilderness’ now converted to wheat fields. His daughter Maude had no need to toil in the fields, she was able to devote herself to painting the changes in the landscape. ‘Pin Mill’, the commercial mill built to grind the corn, the procession of carts rumbling down the track each day, the men and women cutting the wheat. The cottages at ‘Craig Pits’. Did I remember to tell you that building the Hall had involved digging a huge pit at nearby Craig to excavate the stone? Much work for local hands, and a bit of an eyesore. The lowly cottages built alongside the pit were only able to exist there because by now man had discovered how to dig down to the water table – no longer any need to build exclusively alongside a rivulet. Sure, the ‘well’ would run dry from time to time, and the land round the pit was stony and barren, but you had a roof over your head, water most of the time, and there was still wild duck flying over head.

By the 1960s, steam rollers had appeared, trucks full of stinking boiling tar – the dusty cart track had been tarmaced, and renamed the A137. The corn was cut by belching combine harvesters. Water came out of a tap in your kitchen, though the cottages on the left here, after standing for 400 years, left a lot to be desired. Rented out by the local authority, the staircases had rotted and collapsed – so were removed, and the property re-described as ‘ground floor only’. Two ladies occupied them in that state right up to 2007.

Elsewhere in Suffolk, modernity was marching on, and the good people of Ipswich found that sometimes they turned on their taps and nothing emerged. They grew anxious and demanded action. Men from the government travelled down the tarmaced road to Tattingstone.

‘Tattingstone Vale, the very thing’ they said. ‘For ’tis nowt but a collection of old cottages, that ugly pit, and as for the Hall – when was that last habitable’? In vain did the people cry – ‘but this valley is our home, our work, the roofs over our head; for 1200 years we have created this landscape, drained it, farmed it, lived and died in it, and now you want to put the water back in it?’

T’was to no avail, a plug was installed at one end, and the valley flooded with water. All that remained of the back breaking work creating Alton Hall and the farmland was the name. Alton Water.

The cottages were sold to a footballer who had made a few bob following a pigs bladder round a field once a week. Wealthy Londoners snapped up the other homes.

In 1970 the people of Ipswich were unhappy again. They had all the water they needed now, the Ducks came pre-packaged on polystyrene platters; but they had grown tired of candles – they wanted endless electricity. There were freezers to run, TVs to beam out their pernicious propaganda, floodlit football matches to play in the evening.

Men from a government agency once more trudged down the tarmaced road to Tattingstone. ‘Tattingstone Valley Farm, the very place’, they said. ‘We could put 43,000 solar panels here and provide electricity for 6,000 homes’.

There was uproar, this was ‘desecration’ it was said. There will be increased traffic, where will the cyclists in their colourful lycra go? The ‘unspoilt natural beauty’ of the area will be destroyed.  Natural beauty? It is a beauty carved out by hundreds of years of men toiling to tame the landscape to provide the things they needed.

I was reminded of the village of Tattingstone, now divided by the 400 acre storage tank for Ipswich water – prosaically described these days as a ‘natural wilderness, home of wildfowl’ (but not people any longer) – by the current ‘Desolation Row’ over ‘fracking’ to provide gas for the city dwellers.

Lord Howe thinks that fracking should be permitted in the ‘wilderness’ of North East England – but not in the cultivated lands of Kent.

 ”I mean there obviously are, in beautiful natural areas, worries about not just the drilling and the fracking, which I think are exaggerated, but about the trucks, and the delivery, and the roads, and the disturbance.”

Surely it is not a matter of whose house is going to be ruined by carts rumbling up to the mill but where the gas is?

If it’s in the North East, then the North East will have to adapt as Tattingstone has. Tattingstone folk no longer feed themselves by hauling stone for the Squire, but flogging ice creams to the Alton Water tourists.

If it’s in Kent, then the Kentish folks should be the ones to adapt.

So you get a few earth trembles – it’s hardly on a scale with having your entire village deliberately flooded is it?

Discuss. (Politely!)

JuliaM August 1,
2013 at 05:18

Ah, if you’d only held this post over to today, you’d have been in the lead
for ‘Post Title of the Month’ award. Again.

johnd2008 July 31, 2013 at 19:38

When I moved to my home nearly 40 years ago, there were two large open cast
coal mines about 10 miles away. My children were fascinated by the enormous
dragline machines being used. The coal has been extracted and the land
restored and it is difficult to remember exactly where the mines were.The land
has been despoiled again by the erection of enormous wind turbines which
rarely seem to be working.They are far more intrusive than the large holes
were. At least with fracking, once the holes are drilled,the well head is just
a small single storey building which can be blended in to its
surroundings.

charlotte July 31, 2013 at 17:01

Within a mile of my home and on my way to work Halls Aggregates have been
extracting gravel for years. Once the process is over the land is reclaimed
but I don’t know how good it is then. A water sports facility has emerged from
one of the sites. More recently quite a large area has been taken for gravel
extraction and to do so the land was cleared of lots of trees. Most as I
remember were fir but a good few were oak and other deciduous types of trees,
the wooded area was also home to small hart and I don’t see them now of
course; I just hope that they were managed by a ranger before the extraction
began. The gravel extraction won’t last for long in the bigger picture of
things, but any new trees planted will take a very long time to mature. I
suppose we have to accept it because the raw material is used to build homes
and give shelter to others. I just hope that in time the landscape will revert
to its natural beauty, that the traffic lights to allow the heavy plant
vehicles to cross the lane will be a distant memory and the wildlife will
return.

charlotte July 31, 2013 at 19:32

See I told you I wasn’t that bright. Hall’s aggregates seem to be called
‘Lafarge aggregates’ these days.

Saul July 31, 2013 at 13:16

Hydraulic Fracturing (to give it its Sunday name) has been around since the
50′s. It is the cause de jour for the eco warriors, the latest band wagon to
be jumped on. Forget the scare stories. Having been involved in the business
for over 35 yrs, I can tell you that it is a cheap(ish) way to extract gas and
will benfit the UK energy market for years to come. As in all these things,
money talks, and I expect that it will go ahead whenever and wherever
possible. No Squirrels or Newts will be hurt by the process and once drilled
the landscape will remain unaltered.

Moor
Larkin July 31, 2013 at 13:20

@saul
I can remember reading text books at school in the Seventies,
undoubtedly in Geography lessons, where “Oil Shale” was described and
pictured. The book explained that there was more oil in this “shale” than
existed in the sort of oil-wells we all knew about from watching The Beverly
Hillbillies and in later years, Dallas. The book explained that the oil in
this shale was so expensive to extract however that it would be unlikely to
be economic to do so for quite some time.

Saul July 31, 2013 at 13:43

There are two documentaries available, Frack Nation and Gasland, both
of which put their side of the story. Each one is produced in the style of
Michael Moore, so you know what to expect.

I can say that in my 35yr experience I have never witnessed an
earthquake.

John
Galt July 31, 2013 at 15:31

I doubt if you would, certainly a fracking related one as the likely
impact would be close to zero, a gust of wind would do more damage.

My biggest fear is that we do occasionally get earthquakes of around
magnitude 3-4 and given the current ignorance of science in the UK it is
likely that any earthquake in the Northwest will be blamed on Cuadrilla
as a matter of course.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes_in_the_British_Isles#21st_century

John
Pickworth July 31, 2013 at
17:20

A few years back, I recall a friend remarking about some earthquake
in a far-off place and saying thank goodness we don’t get earthquakes
in the UK. Being a student of Geology, I attempted to put him right on
the matter and told him we probably have several tiny quakes a day
with a sizeable one every 20 years or so. Of course, he didn’t believe
me. So off we went to the US Geological Survey website (which I’d
bookmarked years before – sad, I know) and behold, they’d detected a
quake not 30 minutes before and just 5 miles away from our
location.

I’ve been ‘fortunate’ to have experienced 2 major quakes abroad and
2 sizeable wobbles here in the UK over the years. And but for a few
days, I just missed the Asian Tsunami. You just never know… and given
we’re all living on a crusty ball of molten rock whizzing through
space, it’s not surprising when things happen beneath our feet. Which
is why I laugh when you read of people demanding all sundry of warning
signs be erected all over the place.

therealguyfaux August
1, 2013 at 02:43

It comes up as a plot point in the film The Two Jakes (the Chinatown
sequel, with Jack Nicholson reprising his role as private dick J.J. Gittes
once again getting in over his head into matters he had better left
alone), set in 1948. Briefly, the idea was that suburban subdivisions were
being built where there once had been oil fields now thought (erroneously)
to have been played-out (the fields had shut down due to the Depression),
and now the oil drillers were doing fracking via “whipstocking” (a
practice where drillers go in sideways), from off the property; the
problem being that in doing so, they were hitting natural gas pockets. The
technology was known even then; a film made in 1990, long before the
current controversy, is hardly going to falsify the state of the
technology anachronistically, as it required exposition in the film so
that most moviegoers would understand what was going on to begin with.

JuliaM August 1, 2013 at 05:21

Sooooo jealous now, John Pickworth! Always wanted to experience an
earthquake. Never have.

ivan
August 2, 2013 at 20:52

Go to PNG then. If you don’t get the weekly shake you know the next
one will let you know about it. I’ve watched doors swing back and
forth and dust ripple on the ground as the p-waves pass through.

Gloria Smudd
July 31, 2013 at 20:05

A very nice young man recently and expertly described the process of
fracking to me and I was particularly struck by how much of the process was
devoted entirely to ensuring that the earth DIDN’T MOVE before, during or
after the process!

babel6 July 31, 2013 at 21:06

Most young men I’ve ever known would not emphasise the Earth’s
inertia.

Engineer July 31, 2013 at 12:34

The cynical among us might suppose that those complaining loudest about
fracking are the same ones who would complain loudly about having their
electricity rationed because the windmills don’t generate much, we haven’t
replaced our nuclear capacity, and we’re shutting down coal-fired stations for
some spurious reason emanating from the EU.

As always with these debates, there seems to be a lot of ‘information’
floating about from very dubious sources. Until we’ve done a bit of
trial-and-error to see how much truth there is in some of the scare stories
(very little, I suspect), we can’t judge whether large-scale production is
justifiable.

I note that one area of expected exploration is very close to me. I can’t
wait – a drilling rig for a few months is far less an eyesore than thousands
of stationary wind turbines, and a magnitude two eathquake would be barely
detectable. On the other hand, the rising cost of imported gas to keep my
(reasonably efficient) central heating going is becoming a bit of a pain.

Drill baby, drill!

binao July 31, 2013 at 20:53

Seems we’re in agreement again Engineer.
In my own W Sussex village
successful drilling for oil started about 15 years ago and an extension of
another 5 years has been applied for.
Apart from some early disturbance
with gas flaring, quickly resolved, there’s never been a problem.
Huge
numbers of trees were planted to screen the site, and the oil company were
totally transparent about the operation from the start. Even to letting us
on the platform during drilling. No, it’s not fracking, but who
knows?
OK, I understand the concerns for water pollution, but the geology
of our little island is fairly well understood if the massive reports that
accompany local planning applications are any indication.
This is about
real energy supply, not make believe that has to have huge Ed Miliband
enabled subsidies so we can import Chinese solar panels and pretend we have
a renewables industry.
We need to get on with it.

John
Pickworth July 31, 2013 at 21:40

And not a million miles away (in Dorset) is Wytch Farm. What? I hear
you cry. Wytch Farm, Europe’s largest onshore oil field. Across the East
Midlands and Lincolnshire are other productive oil fields with their
collections of derricks, rigs and nodding-donkeys unnoticed and unseen by
many.

Whichever side of the debate you’re on, I suggest folk go Google these
operations because this is precisely the scale of industrialisation you’ll
see from shale gas extraction. No swashes of shiny windmills across every
hill top, no goliaths of concrete and steel like those straddling the
North Sea. It’s pretty small scare stuff on the whole and in 20 years time
people will wonder what all the fuss was about.

ivan August 2, 2013 at 20:59

And when they have finished drilling and the well is in operation there
is hardly anything to see.

The picture available at http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/7/21/energy-impact.html
shows natural gas production facilities as well as some windmills – you have
to look hard to find the gas facilities yet the windmill are in your
face.

Elena ‘andcart
July 31, 2013 at 11:14

I think the whole of England should be fracked. What’s left of it that
hasn’t been fracked already, that is. There’s far too much discriminate
fracking going on. Everybody deserves their share of the fun.

Anna
Raccoon July 31, 2013 at 11:15

Some say that the UK is already fracked…..

Moor Larkin July 31, 2013 at 13:12

The children will be………….
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02628/fracking_2628272b.jpg

Elena
‘andcart July 31, 2013 at 13:27

Not Scotland I hope. I might want to go there again one day.

Chromatistes July
31, 2013 at 11:03

Naturally, the practice of hydraulic fracturing is impossible in Flatland,
but much hilarity has occurred recently in the vicinity of Chez Chromatistes,
with class warriors of all stripes battling the pantomime villain Cuadrilla.
Some of them omitted to paint themselves with woad before cavorting in the
streets of Balcombe, so were carted off by PC Plod in the interests of public
decency. Before protesting, they did, by all accounts, partake of various
libations, and substances derived from magic mushrooms. One of the most-senior
Circles has suggested that exploration and extraction efforts be concentrated
in faraway places, preferably in another dimension. Politics was ever
thus.

Evolution can be a little slow in these parts – the opposable thumb is
still hailed as being revolutionary. The sad reality is that, if Cuadrilla had
simply gone ahead, most locals would have attributed any minor disturbance to
the effects of a large curry eaten the previous evening. Any meaningful
negative externality arising from the activity could be settled by negotiation
or, at worst, through simple legal processes.

Moor
Larkin July 31, 2013 at 13:45

@ Any meaningful negative externality arising from the activity could be
settled by negotiation or, at worst, through simple legal processes. @

It would be interesting to see what would happen if some% of the eventual
tax revenues were promised to a local Trust Fund, which only residents in
the locality (therein lies the rub I suppose) could be part of. An annual
payout could then be made to all those living on the fracking-affected area.
I believe those terribly right-wing Capitalists in Alaska have been doing
this for very many years.

“Anyone who can prove a year’s worth of residency in the year before the
payout is entitled to a dividend. College students who go out of state, but
return on a regular basis, are eligible. Any baby born up to the last day of
the qualifying year will get a check. A family of four will receive
$4,522.72 this year.”
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/10/09/us/fringe-benefits-from-oil-give-alaska-a-big-payday.html

Chromatistes July 31, 2013 at 20:57

So, a Balcombe Baby Boom? Might Swampy and his fellow-travellers
qualify if they maintained a camp for long enough? Worse still, what if
the put-upon Travelling Community besieged the village? Bad news for the
local deer herds, one suspects. Venison all round.

That $4,522.72 certainly beats the £1.15 annual wayleave cheque in
respect of Chez Chromatistes.

Moor
Larkin July 31, 2013 at 10:47

Next thing hey’ll be trying to dig coal mines in Wales and Yorkshire………..

Wotta
Shocka…….!!!………

right_writes
August 3, 2013 at 08:24

And Kent!..

As I understand things, a shale gas plant is not that invasive… Once the
equipment is put into place there is no more impact than is currently
endured by people that live close to wind turbines…

Only with actual energy being converted, as opposed to a mirage…

And without the nasty low frequency noises.

binao August 3, 2013 at 09:47

Can I please have another oil well drilled in my village, this time on
the local rec.
I reckon the intrusion will be markedly less than that
caused by the ‘local in name only’ football team with their floodlit
swearing competitions which this year started in July!
Just trying for
some balance.

no_fracking_in_UK_thanks August 5, 2013 at 13:25

“As I understand things” – the problem is that you don’t. You are
self-confessed one of the nimbys that moans about wind turbines but
probably won’t even turn off your security lights at night, or make sure
any of your electricals aren’t left persistently on standby. Why should
the energy you want to use NOT be generated where you live? I can hear
your answer now – “because it will decrease the value of my property”. Oh
dear, how sad.

There is a wealth of information out there about the effects of
fracking in the USA. Evidence that tells you that you could end up not
being able to drink water from your tap but you could light it and boil a
kettle because there is so much methane in it. By your own admission, all
you have done is listened to the one-sided argument from the Gov. and
those who want to profit from fracking in this country.

What our Gov. are hushing up is that the methane that escapes quite
possibly far outweighs anything that is captured and ends up going into
the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas. We are told that Cuadrilla are not
planning to do any fracking in Sussex which isn’t my backyard but I
wouldn’t want it despoiled. However I have no doubt that they will change
their minds and somehow, the planning system will be fiddled to ensure
that they get their permit.

Ms Mildred July 31, 2013 at 10:45

Er well…..who wants to be ‘fracked’ in their own back yard? Sounds a bit
uncouth to me. Isolated or otherwise. Do we remember slag heaps sliding into a
school? Dirty northern industrial towns like I fled from, wrecking lungs,
shortening men’s lives. Houses sliding into mines or at least tilting a bit.
Whole tracts of forest have vanished in the search for fire wood or shuttering
or fancy furniture. Parts of the Americas are a festering oily mess due to
man’s search for energy. Off shore is now being plastered with wind mills. The
search goes on. Someone ends up being submerged and displaced or put in danger
in the noble cause of providing energy to us lot on our computers. For all our
gadjets and gizmos to keep running. Hop into the car to buy some ciggies and
so on. No matter how we struggle with the need for energy someone will suffer
somewhere. Just better not be me.