A community group has called for mounds of debris and logs to be cleared from Cumberland Avenue in Helensburgh – almost four years after woodland was unlawfully cleared from the site.
Helensburgh Community Woodlands Group (HCWG) says the site is an eyesore and potentially dangerous for any children straying there.
The group has written to David Kinniburgh, chair of Argyll and Bute Council’s planning, protective services and licensing committee, calling for action under the Town and Country Planning (Scotland) Act 1997.
HCWG has also embarked on a public campaign entitled ‘Clear out that Mess!’ with members delivering leaflets in the area around Cumberland Avenue urging residents to contact their local councillors and press for immediate action.
Signatures are also being collected on a petition to be delivered to the council.
In the letter, HCWG puts forward four reasons why the council should act:
- What’s left behind is essentially waste material from an industrial felling operation that has no place in a designated Open Space Protection Area within a residential area.
- They say that the debris and logs pose a real danger, especially to children.
- The council must ‘finish the job it began last year’, when it took direct action to replant 28 trees, and served enforcement notices that secured the removal of the building materials unlawfully stored on site and the lowering of the perimeter fence.
- Local residents want to see the land at Cumberland Avenue cleared and restored.
What’s left behind at Cumberland Avenue is both an eyesore and a danger. Local residents can’t understand why council officials have been so slow to act. It’s time for councillors themselves to take action!
Come on, Council. Stop skirting the issue. It’s time to exercise your legal powers and bring this long-standing protected woodland saga to a conclusion.
Just when are the Council going to do their job? Four years of knowing what it should do and yet it still won’t deal with the owners decisively. A Fife court recently dealt with such a property owner by fining him heavily and calling his action of felling a tree with a tree preservation order as a ‘disgrace’. Come on Council, let’s not be shown up!
No-one should be allowed to trash an OSPA and a nice piece of woodland, which was used by the local people as walking and playing space. Their behaviour was terrible in view of the fact there was no planning permission on the site. At the very least they should have to remove the remains of the trees and roots and level the ground so that there might be a regrowth of natural ground cover in the meantime, I would like to see the Helensburgh Community Woodland Group succeed in turning this site into a community woodland eventually.
This Open Space Protected Area has been left as a horrible eyesore and a danger to anyone who strays into it. The Council needs to move to get it cleaned up as fast as possible and allow regeneration to take place.