The saving of the mountain

A tale linked to the writing of "Guardian Angel", in which a mysterious lady called Susanna Ravenhill quite literally saves the mountain of Carningli from destruction......

In one of those strange conjunctions, I had already started to write this book when the Carningli Graziers Association and the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park signalled their intent to conduct aerial spraying on the bracken covering the lower slopes with a powerful herbicide. Their intentions were no doubt laudable, but immediately there was a cry of  “Save the mountain!” and a multi-faceted campaign built up a powerful momentum in the space of just a few weeks. It was a genuine grass-roots campaign, with no leaders and no orchestration. Local people felt so strongly about the threatened contamination and desecration of this special place that they promised to sit in on the mountain and to lie down in the spraying zone beneath the helicopter -- in full view of the TV cameras. Neither the graziers nor the National Park staff had taken full account of the number of springs on the mountain that are used for private water supplies.  A petition with over 1,000 signatures was submitted to the PCNPA, and with the officers responsible being placed under inexorable and increasing pressure, the proposals were at last abandoned.   In theory, a consent for the spraying was issued, but it was not worth the paper that it was written on, because -- quite deliberately -- so many onerous conditions were attached that the whole project became non-viable.

At the height of the campaign the mountain suddently produced two guardian angels in the form of a pair of hen harriers which were believed to have nested -- for the first time ever -- in the proposed spraying zone. Hen harriers are the most heavily protected birds in the UK. If the spraying had gone ahead, the Graziers and the PCNPA would have committed a serious criminal offence, and would have been liable for arrest and prosecution. The threat to the mountain described in the novel was of a different kind and was on a different scale, but “economic necessity” was the justification in both cases, and if anybody wants to see the novel as an allegory that’s fine by me..........