Letters - Tuesday, February 18, 2020

The Warton Peg Mill may be gone, but it is not forgotten, as many readers will know.

It was the last post mill to disappear from the Fylde’s landscape.

In 1996, as the last sunk, or sunken, post mill in the country, the remains were listed Grade II.

In 1999, A dig was carried out by Jack Smith of the Chorley Historical and Archaeological Society to investigate the sunken timbers and other remains.

However, later that year, the timbers continued to deteriorate and then disappeared from the site on Mill Lane, Warton.

In 2019, Historic England notified the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, Mills Section, that since Warton Peg Mill no longer exists it has been delisted.

This has prompted the question of what has happened to the remaining timbers. There seem to be references to them being stored on the British Aerospace site; held at Chorley; or “stored in secure, dry council premises” by Fylde Council.

If anyone can supply accurate information it would complete the history of Warton Peg Mill. No blame will be allocated in case of error committed!

If you have any information, please contact: [email protected] or call 01253 777950.

Margaret Croker

on behalf of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings mills Section

* Our picture shows Archeologist Jack Smith working in the shadow of the surviving ‘peg’ and buttresses at the historic Peg Mill site on Mill Lane, Warton, in 1999. Inset, a picture of the mill

POLITICS

Deportations are simply hypocritical

During the recent Tory Leadership contest, Michael Gove admitted taking cocaine and Boris Johnson joked of coke consumption, while Jeremy Hunt, Andrea Leadsom, Dominic Raab, Matt Hancock and Esther McVey all admitted using cannabis.

Yet a government made up of these hypocrites just passed a law deporting people who have spent the majority of their lives here for committing minor crimes like possession of cannabis.

The Home Office said they must go to protect the public from serious crime. Most of those deported to Jamaica are not foreign nationals but have lived here since childhood and don’t know the country they are being sent to. The majority have family links to the Windrush generation which came here at the governments request to rebuild this country after the war. One is a father of five who came here a very young child, whose serious crime was possession of cannabis, the admitted drug of choice of many in this Tory Cabinet.

Most committed minor crimes and all served sentances for their crime so have paid back. Nothing to do with protecting the public, they went as part of a disgusting political farce in which the Tories were playing to their voters. The deportations are shameful and unjust further proof, if any was needed that the Tory Party is a party of hypocrisy.

Royston Jones

Anchorsholme

DIET

Processed foods are just not healthy

Despite all the education and information surrounding obesity and diabetes, we still have an ever increasing major problem.

Could this coincide with a change in our eating habits over the last 40 years or so?

We now consume a vast amount of heavily processed foods rather than ‘real foods’ in their natural form.

We were told many years ago that butter was bad for us, so we all bought low fat spreads and semi-skimmed or skimmed milk rather than the full fat version, in the belief that our health would benefit – it clearly hasn’t, hence we are all getting fatter and developing serious health conditions as a result.

Carolyn Hulland

Address supplied

DEVELOPMENT

We need green housing as well

While the Government and others bandy about ideas of electric cars and carbon-neutral flying, why has there been very little movement on building carbon-neutral housing?

Near us, a new development from a big house-building firm is proposed. They pat themselves on the back for being concerned about energy efficiency but when you delve deeper, there are no figures, or intentions of going beyond the national requirements.

There is certainly no intention of building to carbon-neutral standards.

No reasons are given as to why not. And yet all parties would stand to gain.

The additional building costs are small compared to the costs of retro-fitting.

This would be such an easy and effective move to make, compared to turning to electric cars, and the technology to achieve it is already there.

Nelly Trevelyan

via email