A home from home this Christmas for Shropshire eco protectors
While the rest of us are opening presents and tucking into the turkey, the occupants of a camp set up to fight plans to drill for gas in north Shropshire will spend Christmas Day trying to keep warm and dry in their makeshift home.
The members of Camp Dudleston – who call themselves protectors rather than protesters – don't celebrate Christmas, preferring instead the pagan traditions of winter.
A totem pole, rather than a Christmas tree, stands at the entrance to the camp, while homemade holly wreaths adorn the entrances to the bedrooms.
The camp, north of Oswestry, has been constructed with wooden pallets, tarpaulins, insulating bubble wrap and old duvets.
It sits on the proposed site of an exploratory drilling rig which, if granted planning permission, will be used to search for underground coal bed methane.
Critics fear this could pave the way for fracking, the controversial process of extracting gas from the rock deep below ground by blasting it with high-pressure jets of water. However, the company behind the drilling application, Dart Energy, says it has no plans for fracking.
Two of those who will be spending Christmas inside Camp Dudleston are veteran 'protector', Yellowbelly, and 25-year-old Cookey for whom life here is a new experience.
Cookey got involved in the anti-fracking and drilling movement when a drilling site was proposed near his mother's hope at Borras, near Wrexham.
Yellowbelly, orginally from Norfolk, now sees Shropshire as his home and is passionate about protecting the countryside.
He said: "I believe that fracking poses the biggest risk to the British countryside. Here at Dudleston the applicants are coming up against problems, such as the worry of how the construction of the drill will affect the nearby farm slurry pit." He said that supporters of the camp had been tremendous.
"We have had wonderful support both locally and further afield. One man in his 70s wheeled a huge load of logs across the fields for us and we have had gifts of carpets, food and even a log burner.
"We are always pleased to see visitors, whether they simply want to come and say hello or whether they want to come and talk to us about what is going on with gas exploration."
