A PUBLIC campaign to prevent Wellington Rugby Club destroying part of a wildlife site at The Basins has won a partial victory.

Plans drawn up in secret by Somerset West and Taunton Council to give away some of the nature reserve land to the rugby club to enlarge one of its pitches in the former Beech Grove School playing field have been put on hold.

Now, the district council has told the rugby club to submit a planning application for its proposed work and to consult with the community.

The rugby club and local authority had been secretly working up a scheme for three years until the council was legally obliged to publish a notice stating its intention to give away ownership of the quarter-acre area of land.

Tree felling and shrub clearance had by then already started, which to many people appeared simply to be land management works.

It was only after Wellington town councillor Mike McGuffie posted home-made site notices in the area that residents began to appreciate the plans meant felling large numbers of trees, installing a 230-feet long pipe to culvert a stream, raising ground levels by several feet to be the same as the rugby pitches and concreting over some of the site to provide access.

More than 100 people wrote to the district authority to object to the land transfer and an online protest petition was started which by this week had collected more than 700 names.

However, in a statement issued this week, district council interim asset manager Sally Stark dismissed many of the public objections as irrelevant.

For the full story see this week’s Wellington Weekly News.