Longstone Edge quarrying

[Stu]

http://www.grough.co.uk/magazine/2016/06/16/ministers-backdale-decision-ends-17-year-legal-battle-over-peak-district-quarrying

 

[pwhole]

Yeehah - result.

 

[droid]

Excellent.

 

[AR]

It's been a long slog but it's finally over, I think it helped that British Fluorspar did some drilling up there a few years back and concluded there wasn't enough spar to make it worth fighting the prohibition order.

 

[Mark]

What really pisses me off about all this, is that without the mines and quarries being developed in the first place and the communities that thrived because of them, the White Peak would be a very different place.

 

[droid]

Wirksworth wouldn't exist, for sure.....

 

[Rob]

Good a decision has been made.

Not sure which side of the fence i'd be, having not done a lot of research.

 

[Mark]

Wirksworth wouldn't exist, for sure.....

Neither would a lot of the best trips in the Peak District

 

[Big Jim]

And look at the list of Derbyshire Wildlife Trust reserves, SSSIs, LNRs etc and see just how many are post industrial sites (mine rakes, quarries, gravel pits etc).

 

[droid]

Part of the reason for mine sites being SSSI's is the presence of rare heavy metal tolerant plants. indeed, much of the early research on the mechanisms of tolerance was performed using plants from the Peak District, especially the rakes around Windmill.

 

[Andy Farrant]

Mine and quarry sites are often SSSI localities because they have been left undisturbed for decades (and some are of course geological SSSI sites for obvious reasons). The White Peak would be a very different place if quarrying and mineral abstraction was allowed to continue unchecked.

 

[Big Jim]

Or, we loose a few hundred hectares of agriculturally improved ecological desert to quarrying that will one day be left for nature to gradually recolonise with a vast diversity of flora and fauna lost previously to agriculture.....

 

[AR]

Going back to the case of Longstone Edge, the major issue there was that there was an attempt to use a 1950s planning permission to extract spar to instead open a quarry and sell the limestone rather than the spar; what little was found at Backdale was just piled up in the yard. Had the permission been used to chase Deep Rake westwards with backfilling like the other major spar excavations on the edge, there wouldn't have been much of an issue and as Jim rightly points out, the backfill would likely regenerate to an ecologically diverse and interesting community as has happened in the Red Rake/Catsall Rake area of Peak Pasture.

 

[Mark]

Yes but on the other hand, how fucked up is it that Milldam can't sell the limestone that they produce on the development drives, and have to stack it underground in old workings, because they only have a license to extract spar. 

 

[Katie]

Surely they need that limestone to fill up large collapses that mysteriously appear above their workings but have nothing to do with them......