Zip wire neighbours protest at screams of thrillseekers
IMAGINE opening the windows of your idyllic country home and being greeted daily by the “woo-hoos” of dozens of thrill-seeking zip wire users.
Now imagine your reaction if the firm responsible for the attraction applied to set up a second one nearby.
That is precisely how Sarah Slattery feels. Her £500,000 Gloucestershire home is sited just behind the National Diving and Activity Centre, where every month hundreds of visitors hurtle down a 2,300-ft zip wire over a quarry at speeds of up to 40 mph.
Not content with operating one of the country’s longest zip wires, the centre is now applying to run a sec- ond wire alongside the first. Mrs Slattery, 65, is furious at the proposal, claiming the laughing, screaming and “woo-hooing” coming from the ride is making her life a misery. “People obviously scream; sometimes they scream profanities. Women particularly love to scream hysterically,” said the mother of two. “One is bad enough but a second one – no thank you very much. If we’d known what it would be like when it was first planned we would have objected then.” Mrs Slattery says she can hear people using the wire even when she closes the windows of her four-bed home and that it is near-impossible to sit in her back garden during the peak summer months. “The zip wire is literally at the bottom of our garden and throughout spring, summer and autumn it goes constantly,” she said. Mrs Slattery, one of eight residents objecting to the plan, said she may have no choice but leave her home in the Forest of Dean, where she has lived since 1989, if the local district council gave the second wire the go-ahead. A spokesman for the diving centre said: “It will go to the planning committee in December. We don’t really want to comment on it because we don’t want to prejudice the application.”