LORRIES ON THE MOORS
SIR,--Somebody has been taking Quoodle for a ride —a lorry ride. There is no 'proposal of the North Riding County Council to build a lorry route from Hetton-le-Hole to Otstleton through the North York Moors National Park.' Across the moors be- tween Castleton and Hutton-le-Hole (Hetton-le-Hole is in another county and is another story) there has been a road for the last 1,000 years at least, used by the traffic of the times. In recent times that traffic has included a few lorries. They form a small minority among the visitors' motor coaches and private cars and the vehicles, of all shapes and sizes, of local farmers, villagers and other inhabitants. The North Riding County Council maintains this road in a condition appropriate to the traffic that uses it. It has no proposals to do otherwise. It does, however, propose to widen the road in Hutton-le- Hole itself by a couple of feet and to put bridges (carefully designed to match the surroundings) across the water splashes, the approaches to which can be icy hazards when the level of the water does not make them altogether impassable.
It is this proposal that set off what Quoodle calls the 'rescue operation' engineered by the Rural Dean of Helmsley. The County Council's plans have been approved by a three-to-one majority in the Hutton- le-Hole parish meeting. They have been' approved by the National Parks Committee, which was long ago invoked and has politely but firmly slapped the Rural Dean down. If, as Quoodle suggests, the Ombudsman is now drawn in, or the Minister of Land and Natural Resources, or for that matter the Conservative front-bench spokesman on steel (there is steel on some of the lorries), he will need to be told a much straighter story than someone has been telling your columnist.
MEREDITH WHITTAKER
Mercury Office, Scarborough.
[The accidental transformation of Hutton-le-Hole into Hetton-le-Hole is regretted.---Editor, Spectator.]
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