Tomorrow, the Director of Planning will recommend that the Celtique application be rejected at the SDNPA Planning Committee meeting to be held that day. Since Fulking is many miles away from any hydrocarbon deposits, this may seem of limited local interest. However, the basis of the recommendation is of general applicability. With thousands of consultees and write-in representations raising every imaginable objection from none (the Environment Agency) through to extinction and genocide, the Director of Planning largely restricts his case to just one — noise, both from vehicles and from on-site machinery. A particular concern of his is the effect of the noise on one’s ability to appreciate Fernhurst Furnace, a Scheduled Ancient Monument. Since rather little of this industrial ruin is actually visible, silence is presumably required in order to imagine what it would have looked like if the excavations had not been buried under sand over twenty years ago. More here [PDF], especially pages 36-37.