A SAILING lake, restaurant, picnic area and nature walks are all on the agenda to transform a Ribble Valley quarry.

Lanehead Quarry, in Clitheroe, will be turned into a leisure attraction once quarrying work has been completed next century. A public display of plans for the restoration of the quarry is to be set up by Castle Cement.

Announcing the plans for the exhibition, Castle's works general manager Ian Sutheran, said: "A number of issues have been raised and we are happy to explain the finer points of what we regard as an imaginative scheme."

Details of the proposals for the quarry have already been widely publicised, but have met with opposition from local environmental campaigners.

Now protesters and the company chiefs will have the chance to discuss the plans.

The restoration proposals have been submitted to Lancashire County Council.

Limestone extraction from the 107-hectare site will be permitted up to the year 2042. The plans are seen by the company as a substantial advance on the basic sailing lake concept first devised in the 1970s.

The focus of the project is a large sailing lake surrounded by steep cliffs, broken by wooded benches and gently sloping grassland running down to shallow shoreline.

Diverse wildlife habitats will include scrubland, marshland, rocky islets and rolling pasture.

A footpath network, safely fenced from steeper cliffs, would allow the public to walk around much of the lake and the plans also include a nature study area devoted to a local school, a picnic spot and a lakeside restaurant.

The revised restoration concept has also been designed to complement the more nature-based restoration scheme for the adjoining Bellman Quarry - currently the subject of a planning application for re-opening and extension.

The future of Castle Cement's Ribblesdale works rests upon permission being granted to operate Bellman in tandem with ongoing extraction at Lanehead.

A date is due to be set for the public display of the Lanehead plans.

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