#otmoor

It was one of Crowley's better achievements. It had taken years to achieve, and had involved three computer hacks, two break-ins, one minor bribery and, on one wet night when all else had failed, two hours in a squelchy field shifting the marker pegs a few but occultly incredibly significant meters.

vs Adam’s re-routing of the M40

A motorway which should have turned most of Lower Tadfield into little more than the Junction 18 Happy Porker Rest Area changed course five miles away, detoured in a great semicircle, and continued on its way oblivious to the little island of rural changelessness it had avoided. No one quite seemed to know why; one of the surveyors involved had a nervous breakdown, a second had become a monk, and a third had gone off to Bali to paint nude women.

I found there is a precedent for the story of the re-routing: in the 1980s, local citizens of Otmoor and Friends of the Earth, an environmental organisation, saved a semi-wetland landscape that provided habitat for many rare species of birds and butterflies. The field would have been directly crossed  by the M40 motorway.  

The protesters bought the field - known as Alice’s Meadow  -  then sold it off as more than 3,500 plots at £2 a time. Buyers were then advised to sell the plots again – for just £1 or even 50 pence each, to delay construction of the motorway even further, by allowing protesters to appeal against the compulsory purchase of each of the field’s 3,500 individual plots. In the end, the Department for Transport had little choice but to reroute the M40 further to the east, avoiding Otmoor.

The first starlings arrive to roost in the reeds 

One of many flocks of starlings arriving at Otmoor :)

Reeds in the wind (superimposed)     :)))

Blackthorn flower. It’s fruits are called sloes.  The flowers come out before the leaves