GIVEN the sheer intensity of feeling that fracking provokes, the disturbances at Third Energy’s KM8 well near Kirby Misperton this week as the company began to prepare for test drilling were actually fairly low key.

No-one should be in any doubt that feelings run very high, however. Some of those who gathered near the entrance to the fracking site were the kind of semi-professional demonstrators who always appear on occasions like this.

But many, many more were ordinary, decent people who hold very reasonable, strongly-held concerns about the environmental dangers of fracking.

Those concerns have continued to be expressed forcefully but entirely justifiably ever since North Yorkshire County Council took the controversial decision last year to allow fracking at the existing two-mile-deep KM8 well. The fracking application was the first to be approved in the UK since 2011, when tests in Lancashire were found to have been the probable cause of minor earthquakes.

The strength of local opposition to fracking in North Yorkshire was clear from the outset. The campaign against fracking in Ryedale continued through a failed High Court challenge and intensified once the county council signed off outstanding planning conditions a week ago.

The latest challenge, from Friends of the Earth, relates to the quality of Third Energy’s bat survey.

This smacks a little of desperation. But it is absolutely vital that every possible concern about this controversial process should be aired openly and transparently - and that includes the question of rare bats. Our own view is that proper evidence and regulation will be vital if and when fracking actually does begin. We’re still not convinced that the evidence for fracking stacks up. Complete transparency is vital, therefore. We must not be allowed to sleepwalk into an environmental disaster.