Wildlife will struggle in cyclist onslaught
As regular visitors to Entry Hill Golf Course over many years, we have been reading with interest the letters in the Chronicle about the conversion of the course to a mountain bike park.
The golf course is hilly but is hardly mountainous and is very short. It is also a very beautiful green space with a great variety of mature trees and an abundance of wild flora and fauna. What will happen to the deer when the bike trails are fenced around so that cyclists must pay to ride them?
How will people safely grow vegetables in a community growing space when it was formerly a rubbish tip with no record of what industrial waste was deposited there? The badgers and any deer which are still in existence will probably enjoy foraging there too.
The green woodpeckers, which are ground-feeding birds, will not enjoy the constant presence of cyclists and neither will the grass snakes. The wild daffodils, snowdrops and wild garlic will not survive cyclist onslaught either. There are plenty of other plants and small animals and birds which will struggle to survive the massive construction work which is being proposed.
What contribution to the climate emergency and the biodiversity much-touted by the council will a bike park make? It might make more young males more active more often but it will not attract more women or more pensioners and it will deter the many dog walkers.
Because of its origins as a tip the course is currently monitored for radon and methane gas emissions. Will these monitoring points be protected from cyclists and will the construction of the trails disturb the capping of the tip? There has been considerable movement of the terrain over the years with bumps and hollows appearing and disappearing.
Also, and perhaps more pertinent, why is the council providing £500,000 or more to build this “facility” when it said it could not afford to provide the necessary investment to repair the ravages of time on the golf course in order to bring it back up to standard – thus making a major contribution to its recent decline in usage?
The council says that it followed the legal procedures for tendering. It was very secret and, although a consultation was held to find out what residents wanted in the space, no effort was made to limit that consultation to those who are interested in it (namely golfers and residents of Bath), and no consultation was held on what was actually on offer. The tendering process rejected two golf business tenders which did not require any council subsidy. The group chosen to run the bike park, following the secret tendering process, state on their website that they have been preparing for this, with the council, for at least two years. They are now crowdfunding to maintain the bike trails they operate in Bristol and claim that they will soon be crowdfunding for funds needed to develop the Bath Bike Park.
Perhaps the councillors and officers who are so keen on this project should check the financial position of their protege project before handing over half a million pounds of council taxpayers’ money.
R Black and A Hallows