The police declined to give me specific details or arrest numbers for Wednesday April 5. But the difference between the scenes that can be seen on Facebook — the protesters live stream almost every moment of every day — and what I saw in my two days in Little Plumpton could not be more pronounced.

Tales of “the Wednesday” are repeated to me so many times, independently, by so many people, that it’s clear this was a phase-shift for the people lining the edge of Preston New Road.

While arrests had been made before, the protesters are now expecting this increased level of police attention, and are acting accordingly.

I watch for two days as eight police closely watch Nick roll across the road in his wheelchair accompanied by a woman dressed as a polar bear, as police seize a bike called Clarissa from a man supposedly obstructing a heavy goods vehicle by cycling alongside it, and as 30 police return to their vans having successfully guided a truck past Ricky the labrador who wags his tail at everyone, no matter their views on fracking.

It often looks ridiculous and, on those two days, it’s hard to imagine how much tougher the police could legitimately be.

Hidden Frontline

The protesters arrived in January because they didn’t want Cuadrilla to frack. It was a battle they had already been fighting for six years: in the council, in the courts, through all the litigious channels citizens have available to them.

But now that they have been on the side of the road for three months, their motives have evolved.

The protesters I meet told me they were there because they were being ignored. Because they were disenfranchised. Because a government that is supposed to represent them was playing deaf.

Fracking was rarely mentioned when I was there. Climate change was mentioned once.

Despite the generally jovial atmosphere, the Preston New Road protesters are cracking. They are being battered: by the wind and rain, sometimes by the police, and repeatedly in the courts. They carry the weight of a nation’s efforts to prevent fracking on their shoulders, without much help.

There are some of their number that are not local. I meet LogicAl and a “cuckold clan of gypsy activist tree huggers”, as he identifies them to me. LogicAl did once manage to climb on a lorry — “a fucking rush mate” — and this group occasionally disrupts the site in other ways which gets them arrested.

A couple of them, such as Tina Rotheray and Gayzer Frackman, can be seen at various actions across the country and have taken on the mantle of spokespeople for the movement. A movement that is becoming fractured as patience wears thin and Cuadrilla, lorry-by-lorry, continues to build.

But most of the protesters I see are local people trying to prevent something they didn’t ask for, that their council voted against, and which is happening anyway.

After more than three months inhaling diesel fumes and dust, extreme caution — maybe even paranoia — has set in.

The protesters see minor moments inside the site as potentially match-winning: a man without a hard hat, a lorry reversing without a guide, the site manager driving a few yards with no hands on his steering wheel as he waves to his ever-present adversaries.

Likewise, the police have begun to interpret everyday actions by the protesters as breaches of some delicate peace: two police flank a protester walking 15 minutes down the road towards the nearest toilet, officers whose only job is to collect visual data on the protesters film a trestle table set up on a traffic island, and three police surround an retired woman in a high-viz vest adorned with hand-drawn wind turbines to ensure she doesn’t take up too much room in front of an eight metre wide gate.

A million minor dramas played out over the two days I spent standing at the side of Preston New Road. Most of them physically unimportant beyond the 25 metres of tarmac that has become these people’s entire world, but scenes that could still prove symbolically crucial.

This is no longer just about fracking. This dispute is now about London versus the North. It is about the government failing “the people” from which it is becoming increasingly detached. It is about people sensing hopelessness and helplessness and trying to find a means to resist.

These are familiar narratives.

The handful of protesters on Preston New Road are on the frontline of a national effort to prevent the shale gas industry getting a foothold in the UK, an industry that more than twice as many people in the country reject as support.

And as the recent High Court decision in London confirms, the local people lining this highway between Preston and Blackpool fighting the fight are — largely quietly, largely out of sight, largely peacefully — losing.

Nonetheless, they promise they will still be there tomorrow.

Words and pictures (unless indicated otherwise) by Mat Hope