Letter: Magic of Old Oswestry Hill Fort will be lost if plans go ahead
Ancient monuments are not two a penny, though in the Oswestry area and nearby Chirk they are being treated with little respect by land owners and local authorities.
English Heritage appears to be about to roll over and Shropshire and Oswestry councils are prepared to despoil the beautiful jewel green setting of Old Oswestry Hill fort for housing and a car park.
The land owner will profit from the development, and so will English Heritage and the councils when they build their car park and charge us all admission.
The losers are the Hill fort itself – which will lose not only its archaeology, but some of its mystery and magic when it is twinned in plain sight with a modern car park – and once again the public, whose heritage is spoilt and marred.
They will see a Hill fort in a degraded less magical setting.
To add insult to injury, they will, no doubt in future, be charged for access to the fort, when access is at present free.
It is so wonderful to have free access to heritage and to have such a feeling of liberty to visit it at any time.
Charging for access to heritage penalises all of us and especially inhibits those who are less well off.
The housing and car park development proposals are obscene money-making ideas at the expense of our heritage. If the councils want a car park for the Hill fort, and to charge for parking, why don't they look to develop the present Morrisons site when Morrisons moves to the new Smithfield development? For those visitors unable or not wishing to walk the distance, a shuttle bus could take people.
Why are the councils and planners so short sighted, motivated by short-term gain for long-term inestimable losses? The planners seem blind to the very thing that makes the Hill fort so special.
Looking down from the Hill fort onto a car park and modern housing will keep us all very rooted in the present, and the magic of Guinevere's fort will be lost.
J McCarthy, Oswestry
