I WAS so pleased to read that Ellerburn church has reopened at last. It’s such a lovely building in an idyllic location and must surely give great pleasure to a multitude of people, not just its congregation.

It’s a fair assumption that the faith and patience of that congregation must have been sorely tested in recent years. Churches, and any other building, can only survive if the resources are found to maintain them, which must be a particularly difficult task in the current financial climate.

Nobody can realistically afford to maintain such buildings for the bat population alone, so there must be some compromise between the needs of the natural world and the people who use the building. Is it unreasonable to expect the bats to live in the roof space and the congregation to use the church?

So a licence has finally been granted to do just that, but it does beg the question, why has this taken so long and resulted in the church being closed and the congregation effectively banished?

What is different now to result in compromise that didn’t exist when the problem first became apparent?

Am I wrong to assume that Natural England (NE) was being totally inflexible and insisting on strictly adhering to ‘the rules’?

Perhaps someone could enlighten us all.

Sadly, this scenario appears to bear remarkable similarities to the bund scheme that aims to protect Pickering from flooding. From the outset almost three years ago, there seems to have been a rigid adherence by NE to ‘the rules’ of protecting the Newtondale Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), with very little regard to the small degree of damage from construction, the ability of that land to quickly regenerate, or the necessity to protect the town.

I wonder if we battle hard and long enough, someone at NE will finally accept that sensible compromise could work to everyone’s advantage – both the natural and human world. How many Pickering residents and businesses could be banished from their properties while we await that compromise, or will NE ensure it never arrives?

Mike Potter, Pickering & District Civic Society