The Dump Next Door

It had been a dairy farm but when we got hold of it only the house and barns were left. A farmer from Radnorshire had already bought all the land and settled in to a derelict cottage next door. His farm in Radnorshire had had an extremely long drive made of concrete railway sleepers. Some people agonise about leaving behind a small gift of working lightbulbs when they move out; this farmer’s gift to the buyer of his farm was to take up all the concrete sleepers and leave a muddy trough a mile long where the farm drive had been. Our neighbour – let’s call him Bob – made his living selling these sleepers as gate and fence posts, until they finally ran out.

Bob then diversified. At that time local councils had a duty to provide caravan sites for Romani travellers, and Bob decided this was a business opportunity. He fortified his land with fences of old corrugated iron, so that the villagers couldn’t see in. The villagers were incensed – they didn’t mind gipsies in a wood some miles away at some time in the past, but not in their back yard. As a back-up Bob also started a business selling pig-wire to farmers back in his home country.

Eventually of course there was a planning inquiry with barristers and suchlike, and Bob got permission for a traveller site provided he built a bund – a big earthen rampart – so that the locals could not see the travellers even if the shifty fences tumbled down. Things were going well, Bob seemed to be prospering, until it was discovered that the pig wire he had been selling was stolen, and he got a couple of years in Gloucester Jail. Word reached us that he was studying Law during his time in jail, ingratiating himself with his fellow cons by giving free legal advice, and was ready to hit the ground running when they let him out.

When he came out he had acquired a reputation of being able to run legal rings around everyone, and this spread even to council officials, afraid he might take them to court. One such high-placed mandarin engineered a visit to my cider mill, pretending to be enforcing health and food-safety legislation, and spent the visit peering from the fruit loft of the cider mill to look into Bob’s compound.

Meanwhile Bob had diversified into waste management. Lorries full of building waste and rubble arrived throughout the day and tipped their rubble on Bob’s land. At this time a landfill tax had made it expensive to dispose of this rubble legally, but Bob hit on a plan to explain that the rubble was material to build the bund around the traveller site, as specified with the force of law in the planning hearing. The council appeared to be too timid to check up on him, even when he evicted the travellers to make more room for the rubble. And the trucks kept rolling in and bundles of notes changed hands behind the fences.

I observed all this for several years, until it became obvious that a twelve acre field – once a pleasant meadow – was now about fifteen feet deep in rubble. Bob was building a mountain, and eventually I decided to act.

The responsible body was the Environment Agency. I got through to Lee – it was always Lee, he was the smooth-talking frontman  – and explained what was happening and suggested that they needed to check for harmful chemicals and asbestos at the dump next door. Lee was very emollient and eminently reassuring and said he would look into it. The Environment Agency has been among the agencies who have allowed the sewage scandal to develop, partly as the result of staff shortages caused by the austerity cuts and by Liz Truss when she was at Defra, but I need to assure you that even before the cuts they were anything but dynamic. I spoke to Lee at least once a week, and he was still unflinchingly reassuring that he was looking into it. Every week there would be a reason why no progress had been made. I started to diversify a bit and spoke to the local planners. I had met the man I spoke to on the phone, who drove past on the main road every day on his way to work, but he said he knew nothing about it. I suggested that if he continued to know nothing about it much longer he would be able to see the summit of the new mountain as he drove to work, but this planner, assiduous in removing any signs I erected so that people could find my cider shop, was not about to get assiduous about a new hill rising on his patch.

And so I got back in touch with Lee, who told me that they were planning a multi-disciplinary meeting. As is the way with these meetings, often someone had to cancel, and you can’t have a multi-disciplinary meeting with one of the disciples missing, and so Lee would tell me that he was rescheduling the meeting.

I was never rude to Lee, though I sometimes suggested that someone more cynical and less tactful than me might wonder if he was telling lies, and his courtesy and patience never failed him. I was beginning, even as I ran out of patience, to admire his diplomatic skills. But eventually I think his patience broke. Not with me, but with his employer. I think he was serving his notice the next time I called him, and so he felt free to tell me, in the most diplomatic and unattributable way, that no-one was going to do anything about the dump next door. If the council closed down illegal waste dumps, they feared the waste would get fly-tipped in laybys, and the dump next door was tolerated to save them the trouble and expense of clearing up the laybys.

Eventually Bob died. His family were all country people for whom owning land is important, but they all refused to inherit this land, and as far as I am aware it is unclaimed and unloved and uncared for to this day. If the authorities decided the owner had to rehabilitate the land the cost would be some millions, no doubt, and so no one dares to own it. And so as a result of the failure of the Environment Agency to protect the environment, the village may have its first unofficial rewilding site.

The Environment Agency, which doubtless has young, idealistic and dedicated staff even more able than Lee, is responsible for treatment of contaminated land; water quality and resources; fisheries; inland river, estuary and harbour navigations, and conservation and ecology. It would be fun if it were possible to give old Lee a call and ask him what they are doing about the sewage pollution and the destruction of the Wye. I’m sure he would rise as smoothly to the challenge as a trout to a fly. If there are any trout still, or flies, in the rivers they look after.