Yesterday and today were devoted to site visits – not the usual huddle of Councillors and Officials in the rain in front of a controversial house extension but more a film set for Lawrence of Arabia.
An army of proponents and objectors to the application accompanied the planners and Reporters on an exhaustive – and exhausting – trek over the whole site. We looked from prospective tee to site of future green eighteen times and tried to imagine how the sand dunes which were blinding us from an azure sky might become sterile, manicured fairways.
Every butte and hollow seemed to sport a TV camera or stills photographer, pressmen would scribble down every word which was said (although we knew their reports would be tweaked to suit their editors’ take on the rights or wrongs of the case). Live filming of the proceedings of a public inquiry is not permitted and the Chief Reporter’s irritation at a film crew who ignored his instructions to stop grew as the sun beat down on us.
The vast sands of the domes, to be “stabilised” by golf course proposals, scarcely needed pointing out as we wished for camel-taxis but we had to send out scouts to locate the threatened rare plants for which you have to search on hands and knees. We assisted the pressmen to take their snaps and carefully spelled out the names of ferns and sedges. It was less easy to say of the big picture of the value of the dune system as a whole which is at stake “There it is, that’s what we were talking about”
The rules for site visits are that you can direct the Reporters’ attention to features you want to be noted but may not discuss the arguments. This may seem straightforward but, in practice, it is often difficult to abide by such a rigid line when you want to say “look at this bit of vegetation damaged by trampling, what would be the impact of 10,000 people passing this way?” without straying into repeating evidence given last week in an airless hall. Both sides were chastised occasionally but relationships remained business-like and even cordial between people who only last week were denying the truth of what the other was saying (and, by proxy of their advocates, will do so again tomorrow at Closing Submissions.)
That's what will take up the remainder of the Inquiry over the next two days.