I found this article while looking for fort-related folklore, and it made my blood feel a bit fizzy so I thought I’d share. Fortunately the Powers That Be protected the site – Mr Adkins literally couldn’t give less of a monkeys about it. Presumably he also owned Bomere Pool (scene of much folklore including a sword-wearing fish... maybe the reason why this place doesn’t need any). Not that he’d be remotely interested in that either.
No interest in hill fort site, farmer says.
A pre-Roman conquest hill fort, scheduled as an ancient monument, would be substantially destroyed by a farmer’s plan to build about 30 expensive houses on the site, it was said at a Ministry of Housing and Local Government inquiry at Shrewsbury yesterday.
But the farmer, Mr John Ivor Adkins, of Bomere Farm, Bayston Hill, near Shrewsbury, said that in the ten years he had been farming there, not one person has displayed an archaeological interest in the hill fort site on his land. “There is not even a notice indicating its existence,” he said.
Mr Adkin was appealing against the refusal of Shrewsbury County Council to allow him to develop a seven-acre site on his 200-acre farm for house building. The county council’s reasons for refusal were that the site was remote from the main village of Bayston Hill and was outside the area appropriate for development; an unclassified road which would serve the proposed development would create a traffic hazard at its junction with the A49; and the development site was an Iron Age hill fort dating from 300BC – AD 30, and scheduled as an ancient monument of national importance.
Mr Stephen Brown, Q.C., for Mr Adkins, said the site was on poor agricultural land and there was no objection to the building proposals by the Ministry of Agriculture. Dr Michael Thompson, inspector of ancient monuments in the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works, said the proposed development would leave only a third of the hill fort site unmolested. Cross-examined by Mr Brown, Dr Thompson agreed it might be possible to excavate the site at the developers’ expense when building operations were being carried out. But his Ministry’s main object was to preserve the fort as a memorial rather than as a site for archeological and scientific investigation.
The inquiry was closed.
In the Birmingham Daily Post, 4th May 1966.