Latest news with #Malmesbury
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Campaigners fly banner in protest over solar farm
Campaigners have flown a banner as part of a protest against plans for a 2000-acre solar farm. Hundreds of residents took part in a community walk on the Fosse Way in Wiltshire in opposition to Lime Down Solar Park. Island Green Power (IGP), which is behind the plans, wants to build solar panels on farmland near Malmesbury to produce enough energy to power 115,000 homes. The campaign group said it was not opposed to solar power, but it did object to the "industrial scale" of the Lime Down project. More news stories for Wiltshire Listen to the latest news for Wiltshire Plans were unveiled last March for one of the biggest solar parks in the country which would span across the villages of Hullavington, Stanton St Quintin, Sherston and Luckington in north Wiltshire. Members have organised events to draw attention to their campaign including a 3.5-mile (5.6km) walk along the Fosse Way, passing along countryside which would be affected by the plans. Campaigners flew a banner above the countryside reading: "No to corporate greed - Stop Lime Down." IGP said the Lime Down project would "support national and regional aims to decarbonise our electricity systems and bolster our energy security." Senior project manager Will Threlfall said: "We are grateful for the feedback we received to the previous stage of our consultation, which continues to inform the refinement of our plans for the project and is helping us to develop our proposals responsibly, and in a way that recognises local community and stakeholder views." It was expected to submit an application for development consent later this year. Follow BBC Wiltshire on Facebook, X and Instagram. Send your story ideas to us on email or via WhatsApp on 0800 313 4630. Solar park will 'completely swamp' nine villages Report suggests 88% against solar park plans Solar farm landowners urged to put 'community above profit' Solar developer no show at meeting 'appalling' Island Green Power
BBC News
2 days ago
- Business
- BBC News
Protesters fly banner in protest over Wiltshire solar farm plans
Campaigners have flown a banner as part of a protest against plans for a 2000-acre solar of residents took part in a community walk on the Fosse Way in Wiltshire in opposition to Lime Down Solar Green Power (IGP), which is behind the plans, wants to build solar panels on farmland near Malmesbury to produce enough energy to power 115,000 campaign group said it was not opposed to solar power, but it did object to the "industrial scale" of the Lime Down project. Plans were unveiled last March for one of the biggest solar parks in the country which would span across the villages of Hullavington, Stanton St Quintin, Sherston and Luckington in north have organised events to draw attention to their campaign including a 3.5-mile (5.6km) walk along the Fosse Way, passing along countryside which would be affected by the flew a banner above the countryside reading: "No to corporate greed - Stop Lime Down." IGP said the Lime Down project would "support national and regional aims to decarbonise our electricity systems and bolster our energy security."Senior project manager Will Threlfall said: "We are grateful for the feedback we received to the previous stage of our consultation, which continues to inform the refinement of our plans for the project and is helping us to develop our proposals responsibly, and in a way that recognises local community and stakeholder views."It was expected to submit an application for development consent later this year.
BBC News
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Two dance music festivals planned for Charlton park in Wiltshire
Concerns have been raised about two music festivals due to take place at the same Wiltshire venue on the same music festival Existance has already been granted a license for its event at Charlton Park near Malmesbury, due to take place over four days from Thursday 12 Gemfest – a festival for fans of house, garage, jungle, and drum & bass – has applied for a licence for the same dates in a different part of the sprawling 450-acre last year Charlton Park was the home of world music festival WOMAD, which is taking a break this year before moving to a new location in 2026. Existance and Gemfest are both smaller events in comparison to WOMAD, which usually attracts tens of thousands of is expected to attract 1,000 revellers, while Gemfest organisers said they expect no more than 5,000 ticket licence application is due to be decided by Wiltshire Council's northern area licensing sub a public consultation, the Earl of Suffolk & Berkshire - the site's owners - said that running the two events at the same time was achievable."Both events, combined, are a very modest proportion of that which have been previously across the estate when WOMAD was operating and there is nothing about the overall numbers of attendees, nor the space that is being occupied that appears to me likely to undermine the licensing objectives", he said. 'Noise plan obsolete' But the council's own environmental protection and control team opposes the application. In a letter to the committee, environmental health officer Damaris Broad said: "While the noise management plan for Gemfest does not raise major issues, it does not account for noise generated from Existance."The introduction of Gemfest will make the Music Noise Levels in Existance's noise management plan obsolete as the noise levels the festival will be attempting to adhere to at monitoring points will have changed due to noise from Gemfest."The licensing hearing will be held on Monday 2 June at the council offices at Monkton Park in Chippenham.
BBC News
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Thousands party at Shindig festival's new venue
Thousands of music fans have been partying at a festival in its new country estate has moved from Somerset's Dillington Estate to Wiltshire's Charlton Park, where it will be held for three the music stages – which are hosting guests including Gilles Peterson, and Sean Kuti & Egypt 80 – there has been a huge procession of samba drummers, a graffiti battle and various art director Simon Clarke said the festival's new contract with Charlton Park, in Malmesbury, "allows us to do a lot more creative things". Mr Clarke said organisers had moulded the ten-year-old festival around its visitors."They bring kids, they like to dance and have a good time," he said, adding the staff aim to create "a bit of magical feel about the whole thing"."I love seeing people coming back," Mr Clarke said. "Some of the people we know really well now, they've come for ten years."Charlton Park has been the home of Womad festival for 17 years. But Woman is now moving to an as yet unannounced new home next year following a year off in 2025.
The Independent
22-05-2025
- General
- The Independent
The London-born teenager set to become Britain's first millennial saint
Saint-making in the Catholic Church – or canonisation as it is called – is traditionally a drawn-out, opaque process with the successful candidates who have emerged from it in recent times usually worthy but unsurprising long-dead clerics and nuns. That is why Carlo Acutis joining their heavenly ranks has caught the attention of so many. London-born, raised in Italy, this tech-savvy, deeply devout teenager tragically died aged just 15 from leukaemia in 2006. Pope Francis's decision in 2024 to approve his canonisation saw him labelled 'the first millennial saint'. As with many of the late Pope's bold, breaking-with-precedent decisions, this one appeared to be based, in part at least, on a realisation that the Church feels alien and irrelevant to many young people because of its outdated stance on sex before marriage, women's equality and same-sex relationships. Holding up Acutis as a role model – which is part of their job description – is therefore showing a sceptical young audience that Catholicism isn't only for the old and the conservative. If in doubt of the symbolic power of Carlos Acutis, take a look at the stained-glass window featuring him that was installed in 2022 in St Aldhelm's Catholic Church in Malmesbury. Unlike the medieval bishop in vestments and carrying a crozier in the window next door, he is depicted dressed in standard 2006 teenager garb, with a digital watch and a phone strapped to his rucksack. In other words: very ordinary, very now, yet simultaneously the Church has decided through its canonisation process someone extraordinary by dint of his religious devotion and his 'heroic virtue' in living his short life as 'a servant of God'. These are the key qualities for any saint in Catholicism's famously lengthy rulebook. Francis had planned to preside at the canonisation ceremony last month (the latest of 900 saints he had made during his reign, 813 of whom came from the 15th century), but it was postponed as the seriousness of the health problems that led to his death became apparent. No new date has yet emerged from his successor Leo XIV, but a popular American Catholic priest podcaster, David Michael Moses, is upping the ante by telling his 330,000 YouTube followers that the new pope already has a special connection with Carlo Acutis. That, he hopes, will mean that the canonisation could take place soon and be the first of this pontificate. The bond between the two rests, Moses enthuses, on the fact young Carlo did his secondary education at the Leo XIII Institute in Milan. 'What are the chances,' he says in his folksy way, 'that the school he's attending when he dies was named after Pope Leo XIII, the predecessor of our new Pope Leo XIV, the pope that Leo XIV says inspired him to choose the name? How cool is that?' And there is more. 'If that wasn't enough, listen to this quote from Carlo Acutis. 'I offer all the suffering I will have to suffer for the lord, for the pope, and for the Church.'' It might not pass muster as a watertight argument in a court of law, but in the Vatican, the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, which has been in charge of saint-making for centuries, assesses evidence in a very different way. Acutis, the boy now also referred to as 'God's Influencer', was born in 1991 in west London and baptised in Our Lady of Dolours parish in Chelsea. His Italian mother Antonia and half-Italian, half-English father Andrea moved to Milan six months later and raised their only child there. Early on, his banker parents say, he showed a particular empathy and social conscience, saving up his pocket money to hand over to good causes that helped the poor, or standing up for those bullied at his school. But it was the always present religious dimension in him that was so unusual in an age where church attendance, especially among the young in Italy, is in steep decline. When on family holidays at Centola in southern Italy, little Carlo would wander over as a child and join the group of old women who gathered each day to say the rosary on the beach. And it was Carlo who insisted on the family going to church each Sunday. Before that, his parents had been pretty much lapsed from the religion of their own upbringing. As a teen, he would cook food and deliver it to those who were homeless and on the streets of Milan. He became a catechist aged 12 in his local parish of Santa Maria Segreta, preparing younger children for their first communion. Next, the skills he mastered early with digital and computer technology saw him producing the parish newsletter and compiling and updating a public website that collected all reported miracles around the world attributed to the Virgin Mary and the Eucharist. It is all the more remarkable that he did all this while limiting himself to one hour a day on screens, his mother later stressed. When diagnosed with incurable leukaemia in 2006, he told her, 'I die happy because I didn't spend any minutes of my life on things God doesn't love.' For some parents, a child self-limiting to an hour of screen time per day would count as a miracle in itself, but the Vatican has a higher bar. To be declared a saint, there has to be evidence presented that praying to the candidate had precipitated two separate miraculous events. In 2020, the Vatican department in charge of canonisation published evidence that prayers directed to God via Carlo Acutis had cured a Brazilian youngster, Mattheus Vianna, from a rare disease. Pope Francis accepted these findings, reached after interviewing around 500 people, including medical experts who, it was said, could come up with no other plausible explanation. Then, in 2024, another report accepted that prayers made to Acutis had spared the life of a young woman in Florence who had had a bleed on her brain that doctors had said would kill her. There will, of course, be sceptics who question the science that leads to these conclusions, including many Catholics, who struggle to make sense of the randomness of these divine interventions when so many other tragedies occur each and every day. Others, too, point to the cost of the Vatican process of discernment, which has to be met by those putting forward the candidate. Pope Francis did move – in line with his wider embrace of what he referred to as 'a poor Church, for the poor' – to cut these charges, but they remain considerable. It may explain why usually only religious orders can afford to immortalise their brethren or sisters. Or the occasional wealthy family. Antonia Salzano, Carlo's mother, would add another miracle to the list. She was in her forties when her son died, and assumed she would never have another child. One night, he appeared to her in a dream and told her she would have twins. And, at 44, she did. Quite how the Vatican could verify that as true is hard to imagine, but getting too wrapped up in the process risks missing the point. The Church gets many things wrong about human beings, but it also gets a lot right, including that we do respond well to role models being held up in front of us to emulate. It was doing it long before the advent of social media. Moreover, there is an argument that connects the cult that has grown so quickly in recent years around Carlo Acutis with those others of his generation who, a recent survey by the Bible Society reported, are returning to the pews in surprising numbers. Perhaps the Church isn't quite so old-fashioned and otherworldly as we like to think.
