They've just dug up our hill: The council had refused planning permission on conservation grounds. So at 6am the bulldozers came to 'clean up'. Nicholas Roe reports

An unpleasant event took place the other day on a wild and beautiful area of land called Royate Hill in Bristol - land that supports 195 species of plants and has been listed as a Site of Nature Conservation Importance.

At 6am on a bank holiday Saturday, when everything was quiet and nobody was looking, bulldozers moved in and started ripping the ground apart.

Trees were cut down, shrubs destroyed and earth gouged up. Wildlife fled, local residents leapt from their beds to weep at the mayhem, and Bristol City Council's legal officers, who were called to the scene, began the difficult job of securing an injunction on a bank holiday to stop the work. They succeeded, but it took several hours and during that time almost a third of the five-acre site was devastated.

Two points mark out this event. One is that the destruction took place despite clear official disapproval. Last December a planning inspector refused to permit housing development on this slice of disused railway land, citing environmental reasons for his decision. Royate Hill, he told the land's owners, Beechgold Developments Ltd, was 'an area of semi-natural vegetation, which is a scarce resource in Bristol'.

Neither this decision, however, nor the fact that the local authorities had indicated a wish to preserve the site because of its ecological importance, managed to keep the bulldozers at bay.

It took an injunction to do that - served after destruction had begun. Beechgold claimed at the time that it was simply obeying an order from Bristol City Council to tidy up the site. The fact remains, however, that the company's interpretation of that order destroyed wildlife that stood in the way of its housing proposals.

The second and more alarming point is that what happened at Royate Hill is becoming more common throughout Britain. Phillip Lomax, a conservationist working as countryside manager for Eastleigh Borough Council in Hampshire, has studied the problem for three years and says: 'It is happening all over the country.'

The problem is bewilderingly simple: local councils can refuse planning permission in order to save wildlife, but having done so they lack adequate powers to protect the wildlife from its owners.

It is not illegal, generally speaking, to dig up your own flowers and bushes, even if by doing so you

are destroying the very reason planners gave for refusing development permission. Refusal itself becomes an ecological death

warrant.

The irony is best appreciated in context. Mr Lomax began a crusade to change the law on this matter after suffering his own official showdown with bulldozers in circumstances similar to the Bristol case. 'I was angrier than I have ever been in my life,' he says.

The showdown happened in 1989 when he was working as nature conservation officer to Leicester City Council, a particularly green authority which had commissioned a six-year study of all wildlife areas within its borders.

As in the Bristol case, the showdown came over a piece of disused railway land that had been highly graded but lay in private ownership. What happened was almost farcical. In early 1989 the owners submitted a planning application and were warned by council officers that refusal was likely because of the site's ecological value.

Eight days after the application the owners stripped the site of much vegetation, claiming that they were tidying the area. Mr Lomax re-surveyed the site, however, and insisted that much important wildlife had survived, so Leicester Council still refused planning permission on ecological grounds.

The matter went to appeal, but before the planning inspector could visit the site, the land was bulldozed a second time. The inspector granted the appeal.

'What could he do?' Mr Lomax asks. 'Legally, the developers had done nothing wrong. It was a question of whether the spirit of the law had been broken rather than the rule.'

Significantly, when a planning appeal was heard in Leicester some time later on plans to build on land farther along the same disused railway line, the inspector refused permission on conservation grounds. 'The critical difference was that in this case the site was not bulldozed and we were clearly able to demonstrate that there was ecological interest,' Mr Lomax says.

He has since obtained details of six similar incidents in London, plus others in Craghead, Co Durham, and in Walsall, West Midlands, where sites have been bulldozed in conjunction with planning applications. 'Communities up and down the country are experiencing the same problem,' he says.

The key fact is that most environmental protection law is aimed too high - at Sites of Special Scientific Interest, for instance, or at particularly rare plants. Ordinary landscapes that matter to local communities are left vulnerable.

Mr Lomax's answer has been to draft legislation that might overcome the problem, and he claims cautious support from bodies including the Association of Metropolitan Authorities, the Metropolitan Planning Officers Society and the Royal Society for Nature Conservation. These groups have been talking with him about possible co-operation.

One potential problem is that Mr Lomax is demanding drastic measures: he wants to give councils power to make instant orders forbidding any work that might damage a site at any time.

This would cut out the inevitable delays of injunctions, but would also bring howls of protest from developers who have invested heavily in land that happens to have sprouted too well.

It remains to be seen whether the inclusion of an appeals procedure will sugar the pill sufficiently for planning bodies to back Mr Lomax's efforts to gain government support for a new law.

Certainly something needs to be done. The Bristol case proved how much of a struggle it is to get injunctions when work has already begun and also when it is at an awkward time.

Council officials had to meet on a Saturday to pass emergency tree preservation orders and make a rapid assessment of what else a court order might centre on - unauthorised engineering work, trespass on nearby land and causing harm to nesting birds were cited in the end. Most officials were at barbecues when the calls came.

Robin Denford, a legal executive to Bristol City Council, who did much of the work, says: 'There is still not necessarily enough protection for wildlife sites, because if you were to do work that did not breach statutory provision on that site, you could still do substantial damage.'

The good news is that Bristol Council understands there will be no attempt by Beechgold Developments to lift the injunction 'in the foreseeable future'. Also, Avon County Council is hoping to make Royate Hill a local nature reserve, but this means buying or leasing the land and negotiations may take some time. Beechgold Developments has declined to comment.

Tapping public support for such tedious issues on a wider level remains a problem, however, which is why it is important to go back to what all this actually means.

elen Hall and Steve Micklewright, of the Avon Wildlife Trust, were among the first to be called to Royate Hill when the bulldozers rolled in. 'It was a most awful scene,' says Helen Hall. 'There were women in tears . . . if a planning officer hadn't been there the site wouldn't exist today.'

Steve Micklewright describes how local residents tried in vain to turn the bulldozer drivers away - pointlessly, because the machines did not stop. An elderly man, he says, sat down in front of the huge bucket of one machine, someone leapt into the cabin of another, only to be thrown out. Feelings were intense, despite this being simply a local patch of ground without national importance.

Taking me to the site, now part ruined, part beautiful, he points out a tree that he stood in front of as the bulldozers moved forward. This, as much as anything, shows the level of emotion that can be concealed behind arguments about planning loopholes.

(Photograph omitted)