The residents of the villages of Trowell and Cossall have got together to form an action group in case UKCoal do go ahead and put an application to open cast mine at Shortwood Farm. They have got a name and an email address and are starting to put together an action plan. Welcome to CATAC - Cossall Awsworth & Trowell Against Coal. If you want to join them you can contact them at catac@cossall.com. Hopefully at some point they will get a website as well.
NANC have had requests via our website and also face to face to put up a map of the proposed application so, via the magic that is Google Earth and information we gained by the FOI requests we made, we have downloaded a satelite photo of the area and drawn 2 outlines – the one in red is the proposed 2009 version and the one in blue is the outline of the 1995 application. You can see the M1 crossing the image diagonally from bottom left to top right with Trowell Services obvious as a diamond shape either side of the motorway surrounded on the west of the motorway by proposed excavations. That is certainly going to affect their business. Would you stop for a cuppa with that going on around you?
You can see that the 2009 version is much smaller than the original 1995 version. Our friends at Smalley tell us that is not surprising as the application UKCoal put in first time round over there in Derbyshire was bigger than the one that actually got planning permission in the end (thanks to Pressa for that one) and they are expecting at any moment that UKCoal are likely to put in an application to extend their operations. They work on the Mastermind principle – “We’ve started so we’ll finish” and while the coal is still there they intend to carry on till it’s all gone. We don’t want the same thing happening in Nottinghamshire.
