Village that vanquished the travellers: How one tiny community terrorised by illegal traveller invasions turned the tide after supreme court battle

Recent incidents at the village include intimidation, fly-tipping, and arson

Local residents feel they are victims of a particular injustice

Travellers feel the legal proceedings against them are 'racist'

Travellers campaigned with slow series of appeals against their actions

They have now run out of appeals and it is up to the council to take action



No one is entirely sure how the animals died. But then almost every aspect of this sorry story is shrouded in a fog of resentment, fear and political correctness.



What we do know is that on Monday morning, several ponies wandered off the unauthorised travellers’ site at Hardhorn, Lancashire, and on to the B5266.



One, a Shetland, was then hit by a vehicle and killed. At around the same time, another suffered a similar fate.

The gypsy site (left) by the village of Hardhorn (right) near Blackpool, Lancashire which exploited human rights laws to stay in their illegal camp for over four years but which is now set to move on

A police officer, alerted to the scene, arrived to find a further four ponies out of control and in a state of neglect. Since no one claimed to own the animals, the officer decided to remove them for their own protection.



Then things turned ugly. Angry travellers shouted that the officer would do no such thing because the ponies belonged ‘to the children’.



A child, conveniently, cannot be prosecuted for neglecting an animal.

As tempers rose, police reinforcements were summoned.



Fylde Borough Cllr. Maxine Chew for Singleton and Greenhalgh ward, who says 'villages should be congratulated for their resilience'

The police acknowledge that there may have been ‘threatening behaviour’ but are reluctant to go into further detail.



‘Following the death of two animals, we seized the remaining four under the Animal Welfare Act,’ says a spokeswoman for Lancashire Police. ‘There were no arrests.’



This was not the first time the police have had to rescue animals from this site. In fact, the latest seizures bring the total number removed to 12 ponies. And still no one is called to account.

As far as the residents are concerned, though, this was just a typical start to another week alongside the original ‘neighbours from hell’.



In the course of a short walk through the village, I hear tales about vandalism, about excrement, about threats to a man who witnessed a traveller’s van driving into the back of a car shortly before Christmas.



Might this just be hearsay? Not when I am handed the police incident number for the smash.

But this bitter stand-off between villagers and travellers may, finally, be about to change following an important court ruling this week.



After a four-year legal battle by the locals to have the six-acre site closed down, the highest court in the land has just come down squarely on the side of the villagers.



Coming on top of new enforcement powers for councils announced seven months ago, might this be the beginning of the end for the illegal sites blighting communities up and down the country?

Talk to the travellers in Hardhorn — if you can get past the foul-mouthed ranter who threatens to ‘drown’ me in a ditch — and you will hear tales of hardship and of harassment by the authorities.



They explain that this is their land, that they are just simple Irish travellers who want to do the best for their children and that they have nowhere else to go.



‘It’s racism against us,’ says Sharon Collins, 20, a mother of two. ‘If they did this to an Asian, they’d be in court.’

Talk to the residents and you find a cowed community, afraid of being named let alone photographed, for fear of reprisals.



‘The residents should be congratulated for their restraint,’ says district councillor Maxine Chew, one of the few willing to speak openly.



She takes me through a neighbourhood log of recent incidents at the site — ranging from brazen intimidation to fly-tipping and arson; from sheep-worrying to bare-knuckle fighting.

Just don’t get the villagers started on the subject of lavatorial habits.

‘The local residents have been extremely patient,’ says fellow district councillor Albert Pounder.

‘But what upsets them most is the sense of injustice.’

If the villagers ignored planning laws, he says, their property might be pulled down. Yet here is a section of society which feels entitled to build whatever it wants wherever it wants and call it a human right.

It was more than four years ago that an extended clan of Irish travellers arrived in Hardhorn, a few miles inland from Blackpool.



They drove straight into a field, recently acquired by a man from Yorkshire, followed by a fleet of lorries.



And, in the course of a November weekend, they covered the land in concrete and caravans while putting a retrospective planning application under the door of Fylde District Council.



Even though permission was swiftly denied, they could now play the system.



The gyspy site reportedly jumped up over a matter of days when vans and caravans appeared one day and concreted a stretch of land before claiming it as theirs

They lodged a slow succession of appeals against the decision, first with the planning authorities and then on through successive tiers of the legal system.



Along the way, arguments about local planning policy were superseded by the great mantra of the age — human rights.

One judge ordered the council to give the place a postcode, even though it was an unauthorised site, ostensibly to help the emergency services find it on sat nav.



As the locals are swift to point out, this has also made it easier for the travellers to register for state benefits — and has caused a few amusing moments, too.

One man, who shares the same postcode, recalls a visit from a car transporter trying to deliver him two brand new Audis.

The 78 Irish travellers who hail from just four families had refused to budge despite eviction demands from three different courts

After another hearing, the council won an injunction preventing further development of the site and limiting the number of caravans to 30.



Yet when they reached double that number, nothing happened.



This week, however, the seemingly interminable legal deadlock was finally broken at the Supreme Court which ruled in favour of Fylde District Council and the residents.



The travellers have now run out of appeals and it is down to the council to begin the eviction process.

YET, there are no signs of celebration in Hardhorn, even though they may be about to reclaim their panoramic views of the distant Forest of Bowland.

For even if every last caravan disappears by tomorrow, the local council taxpayers will still be left with a £200,000 legal bill.



The village of Hardhorn isn't far from Blackpool, where the gypsies originally hailed from

And they can expect to pay the same again if they want the site transformed back to the green field it once was. Some travellers have already said that they will refuse to leave.



‘We’ll go to jail if we have to,’ one 65-year-old traveller tells me. ‘At least it’s warm there and they feed you.’

The site is reached by a potholed track off the B5266.

Walking along it, I encounter a Vauxhall coming the other way. A middle-aged man, who won’t give his name but says he is the landowner, orders me to leave.

I point out that the road has shared access to other land.



‘No one will talk to you and you are not to enter our site. And if you photograph our caravans, I’ll drown you in that water down there!’ he shouts and drives on.

At the site entrance, a few children are playing with a suitcase. Sharon Collins emerges from a caravan and is happy to talk to me. All these families, she explains, are only living here because there’s nowhere else to go.



The Government, she says, ‘are housing the Bosnians and all the others but not the people from their own country’.



The quiet and leafy village of Hardhorn which has been fighting a battle against the the incumbent gypsy populaton

Though Sharon and her extended family describe themselves as Irish travellers — and speak with Irish accents — she says that they are all British.



‘We have UK passports. My parents were born here, too. I’ve never travelled in Ireland.’

They have invested all their money in this site, she says. Now they have nothing left.



So how can they afford to fund a team of top barristers and take an appeal to the Supreme Court? ‘We’ve got family and friends helping.’



There is exhaustion in her voice. She looks older than her 20 years. But she is friendly; the little girls around her are well-behaved and nicely dressed.



I ask her about the villagers’ accusations of intimidation.

‘They’re exaggerating,’ she says, arguing that the travellers encounter hostility everywhere, even in the local Catholic church on Sunday.



‘You’ve got some locals who won’t shake our hand when the priest says “peace be with you”.’

Whereupon the Vauxhall returns and screeches to a halt.



The angry driver I met earlier is now incandescent with rage, tripping over himself as he leaps out of his car.



Though I am not actually on his land, he shrieks a torrent of abuse and threats. ‘Just ******* **** off!’



The interview is over. No wonder neighbourly relations are beyond repair. The atmosphere is poisonous.

As I walk around the village, I spot one woman grooming a horse in a field.



She comes striding across to see what I am up to. She has no wish to pick a fight with anyone, she explains.



But she can barely conceal her anger when I ask her about the travellers.

‘My husband has had to clear up more human excrement than anyone should ever have to see,’ she says with a quivering smile.

Another man — we shall call him Edward — tells me how he once tried to remonstrate with a traveller about the amount of waste in his field.

‘He said to me: “How do you know it isn’t dogs?” I said: “Dogs don’t use toilet paper.” He said he’d see what he could do but nothing changed.’



The gypsy village has also resisted a planning inquiry and a battle by locals in Hardhorn, Lancs who accused the group of trashing their leafy village

Edward has visited the site several times to raise various issues and says that it is not the travellers themselves who are making this mess but the Eastern European labourers who live on site in smaller caravans.

‘Some of the labourers are very dirty and the travellers won’t let them share their facilities,’ he explains.



Scanning the logbook kept by the local residents’ action group, I spot an entry for December when a Polish man from the site was found sprawled at the side of the road.

Too inebriated to walk, he moaned that he was fed up with a life of ‘bricks, bricks, bricks’.

There is considerable sympathy for the local police who remind me that it is their duty to be ‘mediators’.



The locals know that, most of the time, there is nothing the cops can do and evidence is usually sketchy.

The distance from the travellers camp and the village in Lancashire, which lies just outside the seaside destination of Blackpool

Councillor Maxine Chew can pinpoint instantly the night that a hedgerow next to the travellers’ site was illegally torn out of the ground to widen out the turning on to the main road.



‘It just happened to be the night when the Queen was in Blackpool for the Royal Variety Performance, so the police were rather busy.’ The travellers denied all knowledge at the time, only to admit responsibility later to a planning inspector.

Both Maxine Chew and Albert Pounder, who sit on the council’s planning committee, point out that this saga does terrible damage to the good name of travellers elsewhere.



‘We’ve got a lovely group of travellers near Blackpool,’ says Maxine. ‘They applied for permission for a site, which we granted. It’s far tidier than some of the land around it.



They recently applied to extend it and we agreed to that, too. All we expect is for people to work within the law.’

In the last 48 hours, a few caravans have already started to leave the Hardhorn site, while other owners have been seen taking down their satellite dishes.



The villagers are finally starting to wonder if the nightmare may be over. A man who wanted to sell his house in 2009 — only to see its value halved — may be able to plan his retirement once more.



The farmer who repeatedly tried to drain his ditches of rubbish and empty gas canisters — only to find it all thrown back — may be able to have another go.