Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00My name is Pete. Pete's a Rolland Stuckey. My name's Karen Stuckey. We're both semi-retired
00:06but we do have a business here. We have two residential tenants here, families. One has
00:12been with us for almost 20 years. What used to be the farm and the farm buildings is now commercial
00:20units and storage, so we have people working over there. We still have some land and the land that
00:28we do have is still farmed. Well the first thing was when we got this tree through the letterbox.
00:36After that we decided that we should get the landowners together and we called a meeting
00:43which we held within the week actually. Our first meeting was pretty well 100%
00:53attended. Within a couple of days of that, I don't know if the ADF have heard of it, that they
00:59knocked on the door. Mainly I talked to them to see if I could get any information
01:03from what they were doing and they weren't letting on anything at all. I said we had our own meeting
01:11and we decided, we voted, that we weren't going to let you on any of our lands. The guys said well
01:20can you give us a list of the questions to prepare for the meeting up here and I said no.
01:27Can we enter your land to do a survey and I said no.
01:31And yet they still continue to come out, take pictures, take videos.
01:38I moved here in July and then this whole salt marsh stuff kicked off which was a bit of a shock
01:46because obviously in 2011-2012 we kind of saw off the previous attempt to create a salt marsh here.
01:55This is the map. This is the third map that we've seen and as you can see it's a huge area here
02:03and all along here, you know, it's a huge amount of land that is currently being farmed and lived
02:09on and has loads of businesses and homes on it. So yeah it's a real concern for us.
02:16We're the people that live along the seawall and we know the risk. People who've lived here
02:21for years, they know exactly, you know, when it's high tide, you know, there is a concern. So it's a
02:28huge thing to try and talk about bringing the sea closer or, you know, taking down the seawall when,
02:35you know, you can't do that in this area as a reality. We've got, you know, very rare wildlife
02:42such as lapwings and lulls and great crested newts. We've got lots of animals who are protected
02:49so to destroy that, to create a salt marsh, you know, I'm sure natural England will not be,
02:55would not support that. The other thing is that, you know, farm security, you know, food security.
03:03We've currently got very productive dairy farms, cattle farms. The North Somerset levels are older
03:09than the Somerset levels. So everyone talks about the Somerset levels and how old they are but this
03:14is actually more, more ancient and more unspoiled to be a really valuable area and to think that
03:22you'd turn that into a salt marsh or that you'd ruin it in that way is, it's kind of almost,
03:32yeah, it's almost shocking really.
03:34This is our home. And our business. And our business. It was a family farm originally and
03:39we're losing a bit piece by piece. It isn't the money that will get me out of here
03:45but if they start building a sea defence around me, I think. I don't see how we could. Then I would
03:51have, we would have to go. We're now 71 and 68. I've had a diagnosis of early Alzheimer's so my
03:59diagnosis of early Alzheimer's so my thought processes don't work quite as well as they did
04:05and I have trouble remembering things so I don't deal with stress well. You know, there's two
04:10sorts of people in life. People who kind of sit there and complain and then there's people who
04:14do something about it. You're fighting for, for everyone in the village. There is a great
04:19community here and you're also fighting for people who are just very, very directly impacted
04:27by this and it's devastating because it's really taken away their future. You know,
04:32it's a difficult fight because it's, in a sense, it's David and Goliath, isn't it?
04:38You know, you're fighting a sort of corporation and you're fighting a situation that's really
04:45unfair but you have to do what you can do and fight as hard as you can.