The latest consultation draft on the High Weald AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty) 2019-2024 has recently been published. The plan’s object is to identify “significant landscape components of the High Weald and recommend actions that would help to conserve and enhance the AONB.”
In her introduction, Councillor Sylvia Tidy, chair of the High Weald Joint Advisory Committee, points to growing threats to the integrity of the AONB, principally from the pressure for new housing development, which has increased fourfold in the last six years. Another potential threat stems from the decision of the UK to leave the EU. “This has significant implications”, she writes “for how our land-based sectors are funded, with the emphasis shifting from paying farmers to farm, to paying the landowners to deliver ‘public goods’.”
The AONB boundary reaches to the north of Rye at two key points where building development is currently proposed. At the top of Udimore Road, the BP service station planning application has now been rejected, as reported in Rye News,but an appeal is possible. The other point now resolved, is the site of the new care home for the local hospital, which has received consent after much objection.
The High Weald AONB has been described as one of the best surviving medieval landscapes in northern Europe. The report concisely demonstrates how the area is unique because of its geology, its natural beauty and its history of human occupation over thousands of years.
The AONB extends over four counties and includes, but wholly surrounds, several towns and larger settlements such as Tunbridge Wells, Battle and Cranbrook. Its average population density is 87 per sq. km, but it is a most valuable resource to the more than one million people who live within five km of it.
The High Weald AONB Partnership is currently collecting feedback and your views are invited on key aspects of this Draft Management Plan. Download the Plan here and give your comments by July 25 2018.
Photos: Janina Holubecki/High Weald AONB Unit and WSCC