Mike Laycock hails the bog

I’ve been to the bog for the first time in 34 years – and was captivated.

No, it wasn't the end of a very chronic case of constipation but my first visit to Askham Bog, the York nature reserve at the centre of an extraordinary planning wrangle in recent months.

I had written several stories about plans to build 500 homes on land close to the reserve on York’s outskirts, which have resulted in almost 7,000 objections being lodged with the council – including one from no less than Sir David Attenborough – and thought I really needed to go and see it for myself.

The opportunity came recently when covering the visit to York of Magid Magid, Green Party candidate for Yorkshire in the European elections. I followed him into the bog and was transfixed by what I saw.

As an Ilkley lad, I think of bogs as rather bleak moorland to tramp over in wellies. But this was a delightful mixture of deciduous woodland, fen and meadow. If it was called Askham Wood, I'd probably have been there ages ago. There were marsh orchids, marsh violets, meadow thistle and very old royal ferns, and water voles in the pond and Emperor dragonflies zooming round, and then I saw Exmoor ponies grazing amongst the trees. And, almost drowning out the distant roar of traffic on the A64 and rumble of trains on the East Coast Mainline, was a constant tweeting – no, not that sort but proper tweets by real birds. The site apparently has woodcocks, buzzards, willow and marsh tits, and reed warblers.

I walked through on a boardwalk which loops around the reserve and is accessible to wheelchairs and pushchairs. Wellies are normally required to walk through the rest of the site, which has deep pools and ditches, although it’s unusually dry at the moment.

Its survival and protection by the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust is down to two of the city’s great confectioners, Francis Terry and Arnold Rowntree, who bought it just after the war to save it from development, with the Yorkshire Naturalists' Trust, later renamed the Wildlife Trust, formed to receive it as a gift and care for it.

It’s ironic that more than70 years later, its future might once again be compromised by development – not on the site but with the proposals by Barwood Land for 500 new homes on land nearby.

Now I’m all in favour of new homes being built in York – goodness knows, the city needs more housing if our young people are ever going to be able to afford to buy their own home. But to pick a site so close to this exceptionally important nature reserve seems almost perverse.

There are hundreds of acres of very boring, very flat, ecologically unimportant arable farmland all around York that would probably be improved by housing, so why on earth should land close to Askham Bog be selected for development?

Now it has to be said that the developer’s experts argue that the housing development would actually be good for the nature reserve. I, like many, find that rather hard to swallow and a report drawn up by development consultancy Mott MacDonald, experts commissioned by City of York Council to examine the impact of the development of the hydrology of the site, appears to substantiate such concerns.

It’s very technical but, in essence, the trust says it would result in the drying out of the bog.

The trust argues this confirmation of the negative effect on a nationally important site means it should be turned down, although the developers continue to claim their plans 'categorically cannot cause damage to the bog.'

For me, the report seems to tip the balance -if ever there was a balance to be tipped – towards refusal of planning permission.

Askham Bog needs to be protected from any threat and, I believe, more nature reserves should be created around the York area - places where wildlife can flourish and residents can go to escape the tweets of Twitter and relax to the sound of real tweeting by birds.