On an idyllic country estate, shocking toll of fly-tipping gangs who despoil Britain
WITH its sculpted gardens and ancient pastures, Enville Hall has enchanted visitors for generations.
But the ancestral home of the Earls of Stamford and Warrington in rural Shropshire is now counting the cost of the fly-tipping epidemic engulfing Britain.
Balaclava-clad intruders used bolt-cutters to break into the estate last week and dump up to 200 tons of rubbish in woodland.
Enville’s owner Diana Williams, 67, a descendant of Lady Jane Grey, said: ‘This was clearly a big operation which involved planning and had some serious criminals behind it.’
Her family has been left with a ‘five-figure’ bill to remove the waste mountain.
A dog-walker saw a lorry dumping the load at 1.30pm last Tuesday and tried to film it on his mobile phone. But he was spotted and chased by two men in balaclavas who leapt out of a Vauxhall Astra accompanying the lorry. ‘He was really very shaken up by the experience,’ Mrs Williams said.
‘He said those with the lorry appeared to be in the process of changing the registration plate.’
A report last week found that councils were facing almost a million cases of fly-tipping a year.
Local authority waste collection services are being cut, leading to criminals offering to dispose of waste at knockdown prices. They then dump it illegally.
The Keep Britain Tidy charity says fly-tippers are treating the country like a rubbish dump. The Department for the Environment said it cost councils £50 million a year to clean up the waste.
On the 6,500-acre Enville estate near Bridgnorth, the fly-tippers cut through a padlocked chain leading into Million Woods near the 18th Century main house.
Each of the two piles they left was 8ft tall and stretched for more than 50 yards. The odourless rubbish was mostly plastic-based and had been through a compacting process which had turned much of it into solid lumps. It featured the entire range of household recycling from bathroom to kitchen along with a lot of carpet off-cuts.
Among the pieces of rubbish was a copy of the South London-based News Shopper newspaper from March 2013, a copy of The Times from the same period and a leaflet giving the opening times for a Mansfield-based tanning salon.
Mrs Williams added: ‘This is the second time we have been hit in these woods by a big dump.
‘Three years ago there was a much smaller dump but it was 34 tons and it still cost more than a thousand pounds to have it removed.
‘We suffer from some sort of flytipping on the estate every week.’
The estate lies on the borders of Shropshire and Staffordshire. Mrs Williams’s ancestors include Lady Jane Grey, who was Queen for nine days in 1553, having succeeded to the Throne on the death of Edward VI, before she was deposed and executed by Queen Mary.
Staffordshire Police are appealing for information.