Latest news with #Dartmoor
BBC News
3 days ago
- Politics
- BBC News
Toilet charging may increase 'public fouling risk'
Public toilets in seaside resorts and other towns and villages could be closed or have an admission fee District Council says it wants to save about £250,000 a year by closing or charging at toilets in places like Dawlish, Shaldon and Teignmouth and in rural villages on council has given a rating to 20 public toilets with the lowest 13 to be closed or transferred to town and parish councils and the possibility of charging for entry for the seven highest rated.A report setting out the plans to be debated by councillors on Tuesday acknowledges closures could lead to " an increased risk of fouling in public spaces". The council's report also said it recognised a potential "impact on tourism and businesses" and that "a reduction in public convenience provision could deter visitors". Several petitions have been launched by campaigners who want to keep services open, gathering thousands of signatures between local authority said it was a "difficult" decision to "reduce any valued service" but the impact of closures or charging "must be balanced with the council's requirement to remain financially viable".A decision on whether or not to go ahead with the plans is expected to be made by members at a full council meeting on Tuesday. Petitions have been launched by campaigners who want to keep the blocks at those locations Connett, Lib Dem councillor for Exminster and Haldon at Devon County Council, set up a petition to save the public toilets in Starcross, which is in his said the number of petitions launched showed how important the facilities were to many."They may not use them every day or indeed every week but they like to know they are there," Connett said."I hope Teignbridge think again and abandon this plan."
BBC News
4 days ago
- General
- BBC News
Go-ahead for sofa surfer's 'unique' Dartmoor home
A sofa surfer with a plan to transform a redundant chapel on Dartmoor into an affordable home has been told his ideas are just what the moor Sinjun Saunders told members of the Dartmoor National Park Authority (DNPA) that he was the custodian of the old Methodist chapel at Crockernwell and he planned an "aesthetically pleasing" new said he was currently "sofa surfing" – staying with friends – but he and his partner would live in the new home which would have bird and bat boxes to care for local concrete-block pebble-dash chapel was built in 1980 but closed due to falling numbers and an ageing population. There were no objections to the plan and West Devon Borough Council's affordable housing team gave its support as did Drewsteignton Parish said it would help keep the village "vibrant and alive".Mr Saunders agreed to a condition that the property should always be occupied by a local person who was in need of a home and could not afford the current market prices in the director of spatial planning Dean Kinsella told the meeting the plan was "unique" and would not open the door for anyone with a derelict building on the moor."Every site is different," he said. "This is a single unique position."Members voted unanimously to let Mr Saunders go chairman Mark Dracup said: "This is exactly what Dartmoor needs."
BBC News
5 days ago
- General
- BBC News
More Dartmoor National Park land restored as common
Another chunk of land in Dartmoor National Park has been registered as common land, which forms part of Ditsworthy Warren, is grazed and uncultivated, according to the Open Spaces Society (OSS).It was provisionally registered as common land in 1968 but in 1982 a commons commissioner refused the registration of part of Ditsworthy Common because there were "no rights of common", the society Frances Kerner, from the OSS, said it was "particularly rewarding" to see another piece of land on Dartmoor restored as common land. Isolated building It comes as part of a campaign by the OSS to get more common land Inspector Nigel Farthing granted the society's application to re-register the land, which is about 82.25 hectares (204 acres).The society said its application showed the land is "waste land of a manor" which meant it could be registered as common Warren is host to Ditsworthy Warren House, a Grade II-listed building near isolated building was used in 2010 as a filming location for the Steven Spielberg film War Horse.
The Guardian
23-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Groundwater by Thomas McMullan review – a lesson in foreboding
Thomas McMullan's debut novel, The Last Good Man, was a darkly unsettling post-apocalyptic fable about moral puritanism and the perils of mob rule. Set in an isolated Dartmoor village, it was commended by Margaret Atwood as 'a Scarlet Letter for our times' and won the Betty Trask prize. His follow-up, Groundwater, opens in similar style, with its protagonists fleeing a city in favour of rural seclusion, but this time his story is rooted in a more prosaic and recognisable present. An unexpected inheritance has spurred John and Liz to trade in their rented flat in London for a remote house by a lake. After years of trying unsuccessfully for a baby, their relationship strained, both hope that the change will shift something inside them. Meanwhile, though most of their furniture is yet to arrive, they must prepare the house for Liz's sister Monica and her family, who have invited themselves to stay. From the opening pages McMullan stokes an unambiguous sense of foreboding. It is August and the weather is stifling. Walking by the lake John encounters a baby deer, struggling to stand on an injured leg. The next day after breakfast, Monica's children find the fawn dead on the doorstep. A stranger claiming to be a local warden materialises on their land and invites himself to stay. No one thinks to check his claims. When three students from a local campsite also contrive to inveigle themselves into the group, something terrible, it seems, must happen. Reading Groundwater, I was repeatedly reminded of Chekhov's famous exhortation that one must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it. The warden, Jim Sweet, tells John and Liz about the caves deep below the surface of the lake, miles and miles of unmapped tunnels snaking through the limestone. Liz is haunted by the memory of a dog she watched dying in the hallway outside their London flat. She stares at the walls of trees around the lake and thinks of the California wildfires on the news: 'All that burning, a thousand things dying.' Ominousness is piled upon unease and yet McMullan meets his own challenge only with the humdrum. Terrors are proved baseless. Confrontations blaze briefly and fizzle out. Unable to bring themselves to say what they are really thinking, the adults conduct long and often mundane conversations about inconsequentialities, while the twin interior monologue that shifts often confusingly between John and Liz adds little insight or forward propulsion to the narrative. Insufficiently differentiated, their voices blur: though we spend much of the novel inside their heads, their true selves remain opaque, unformed, out of reach not only of themselves but of the reader. Liz, a writer, is working on a scheme to monitor the black rhinos in a national park in Kenya, but 'she hadn't been to the national park herself … everyone was remote'. The same sense of remoteness, of a reality half-understood but never experienced, pervades these pages. Meanwhile a second intercut narrative, in which dream-like versions of John and Liz draw items including a crystal decanter, a crutch and a child's hobby horse from the waters of the lake, adds a baffling dollop of mysticism to proceedings. As I read on, my thoughts kept returning to another novel set by a lake, Sarah Moss's Summerwater, and not only because of the powerful echo in the title. Like Groundwater, Summerwater, told over a single rain-lashed day in a lochside holiday park in Scotland, is preoccupied with the quotidian, exploring through its 12 narrators the fissures and fractures that open in relationships, the certainties brandished like weapons against fear and vulnerability, the joys, yes, but also the small, terrible failures of courage and understanding. Why, then, does Moss's novel triumphantly succeed and McMullan's never take flight? It helps that Summerwater's simmering tension finally explodes into catastrophe, while Groundwater swerves perplexingly away from climax and sputters out. But it is Moss's astonishing acuity, her uncanny ability to see inside the human heart, that lends her work such power. It is much, much harder than she makes it look to draw readers deeply into the small dramas of small lives, harder still to find the universal in the particular, to draw fresh and meaningful patterns between people and landscape, between age-old cycles of existence and the insistent demands of the here and now. Moss manages it with flourishes of sly humour that both leavens and intensifies the horror to come. McMullan's novel would definitely have profited from a few more laughs. Instead, in striving for an elusive profundity, he reminds us how strikingly difficult it is to spin gold from straw, and how very rare and precious are those Rumpelstiltskin writers who show us how it's done. Groundwater by Thomas McMullan is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). To order a copy go to Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
23-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Groundwater by Thomas McMullan review – a lesson in foreboding
Thomas McMullan's debut novel, The Last Good Man, was a darkly unsettling post-apocalyptic fable about moral puritanism and the perils of mob rule. Set in an isolated Dartmoor village, it was commended by Margaret Atwood as 'a Scarlet Letter for our times' and won the Betty Trask prize. His follow-up, Groundwater, opens in similar style, with its protagonists fleeing a city in favour of rural seclusion, but this time his story is rooted in a more prosaic and recognisable present. An unexpected inheritance has spurred John and Liz to trade in their rented flat in London for a remote house by a lake. After years of trying unsuccessfully for a baby, their relationship strained, both hope that the change will shift something inside them. Meanwhile, though most of their furniture is yet to arrive, they must prepare the house for Liz's sister Monica and her family, who have invited themselves to stay. From the opening pages McMullan stokes an unambiguous sense of foreboding. It is August and the weather is stifling. Walking by the lake John encounters a baby deer, struggling to stand on an injured leg. The next day after breakfast, Monica's children find the fawn dead on the doorstep. A stranger claiming to be a local warden materialises on their land and invites himself to stay. No one thinks to check his claims. When three students from a local campsite also contrive to inveigle themselves into the group, something terrible, it seems, must happen. Reading Groundwater, I was repeatedly reminded of Chekhov's famous exhortation that one must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it. The warden, Jim Sweet, tells John and Liz about the caves deep below the surface of the lake, miles and miles of unmapped tunnels snaking through the limestone. Liz is haunted by the memory of a dog she watched dying in the hallway outside their London flat. She stares at the walls of trees around the lake and thinks of the California wildfires on the news: 'All that burning, a thousand things dying.' Ominousness is piled upon unease and yet McMullan meets his own challenge only with the humdrum. Terrors are proved baseless. Confrontations blaze briefly and fizzle out. Unable to bring themselves to say what they are really thinking, the adults conduct long and often mundane conversations about inconsequentialities, while the twin interior monologue that shifts often confusingly between John and Liz adds little insight or forward propulsion to the narrative. Insufficiently differentiated, their voices blur: though we spend much of the novel inside their heads, their true selves remain opaque, unformed, out of reach not only of themselves but of the reader. Liz, a writer, is working on a scheme to monitor the black rhinos in a national park in Kenya, but 'she hadn't been to the national park herself … everyone was remote'. The same sense of remoteness, of a reality half-understood but never experienced, pervades these pages. Meanwhile a second intercut narrative, in which dream-like versions of John and Liz draw items including a crystal decanter, a crutch and a child's hobby horse from the waters of the lake, adds a baffling dollop of mysticism to proceedings. As I read on, my thoughts kept returning to another novel set by a lake, Sarah Moss's Summerwater, and not only because of the powerful echo in the title. Like Groundwater, Summerwater, told over a single rain-lashed day in a lochside holiday park in Scotland, is preoccupied with the quotidian, exploring through its 12 narrators the fissures and fractures that open in relationships, the certainties brandished like weapons against fear and vulnerability, the joys, yes, but also the small, terrible failures of courage and understanding. Why, then, does Moss's novel triumphantly succeed and McMullan's never take flight? It helps that Summerwater's simmering tension finally explodes into catastrophe, while Groundwater swerves perplexingly away from climax and sputters out. But it is Moss's astonishing acuity, her uncanny ability to see inside the human heart, that lends her work such power. It is much, much harder than she makes it look to draw readers deeply into the small dramas of small lives, harder still to find the universal in the particular, to draw fresh and meaningful patterns between people and landscape, between age-old cycles of existence and the insistent demands of the here and now. Moss manages it with flourishes of sly humour that both leavens and intensifies the horror to come. McMullan's novel would definitely have profited from a few more laughs. Instead, in striving for an elusive profundity, he reminds us how strikingly difficult it is to spin gold from straw, and how very rare and precious are those Rumpelstiltskin writers who show us how it's done. Groundwater by Thomas McMullan is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). To order a copy go to Delivery charges may apply.
