IF trying to stop spec builders and "tart-up" merchants from ruining a grand old moorland village is being a "fuddy duddy", then I'm proud to be one of Carl Fogarty's "fuddy duddies."

Many of our villagers have been forced to bite the bullet when their planning applications were rejected.

They took their medicine without insulting their neighbours.

Like all good rules, the planning rules are there to protect us from ourselves.

Carl's magnificent success on the racetracks of the world means that, unlike most of us, he can live wherever he wants.

I ask him, please stop trying to turn Tockholes into Virginia Water.

Those who want to live in suburbia should go and live in it, not turn everywhere into one big suburb of everywhere else.

Our tight little farms and stone cottages in Tockholes haven't changed much since that day, early last century, when our handloom weavers marched over the moors to smash the new machines in the Rossendale Valley.

The Tockholes weavers got away with it that day, by sneaking back home over tracks that the soldiers couldn't find.

Who would say, after a century or more, that those men were wrong?

All progress is not good progress.

What happiness did those new weaving machines bring to the men and women they enslaved?

What happiness will the ghastly new "doll's houses" that now disfigure vast areas ever bring to those of us who failed to object to their trashy designs?

If you want to see what happens when you take a soft line with spec builders, look around you!

Andrew Rosthorn

Tockholes

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.