I WRITE in response to the letters objecting to plans for a small fast food outlet at Burrator Reservoir. I can understand the concerns with litter and traffic, all of which already exist, and clearly these need addressing. 

However, I was astonished by the claim that Burrator is an area of ‘natural beauty’ when it’s anything but.

The reservoir of course is a dammed river, and is a place of ‘look - but don’t touch!’ The many farms in the valley were cleared decades ago to make way for the reservoir and forestry. Even the high moor has been shaped by millennia of mining, every river course has been diverted and remoulded by spoil. Farming has also shaped the landscape, not least through the introduction of sheep which (ironically for ‘natural’ Sheepstor) originate from Mesopotamia, and which prevent the forestation of large areas of the moor.

Currently, areas around Burrator resemble a cross between East Germany in the 1970s and a battlefield, thanks to light and life-sucking conifers planted in rows and periodically clear-felled, and the various bits of pipe and concrete buildings associated with the reservoir. This is not the high moor, it can’t be called wild, and the development surrounding it makes it accessible to those who can’t or don’t dare to roam off-piste across the bogs and tors. The water as always lures people. There is some effort to make the visitors welcome with an ice-cream van, but we could do so much better. 

People have always made a living from this land. National park management plans include stipulations to encourage people to exercise in the outdoors, and in particular to access inland waters.

There is evidence to show that only people who are able to explore and immerse themselves in nature care about it; I would argue that this is the only way we can save our flora and fauna, and probably the planet. Yet somehow we’ve come to a point where groups of people attempt to preserve in aspic some early 20th century compromise between the need for wood and water, and a hazy nostalgia for a rural idyll that never existed. 

There is plenty of controversy surrounding the existence of reservoirs in the national park. But since we have them, why don’t we allow people to kayak, swim and sail there as they do at Roadford?

Why not acknowledge that Burrator is wholly man-made, make it a beautiful place to be active, solve the parking and traffic issues sensitively (and replace the hideous forestry with indigenous trees), and allow people to make a living here in an environmentally-friendly way? Police the littering, make people care. Use the income to mitigate devastating budget cuts.

With the unsustainable costs of buying and renting homes on the moors, it’s increasingly only the wealthy and second homers who can afford to live here. So why are we complying with this ‘Country Living’ magazine theme park dream of the countryside? Let’s make the best of what we have through acknowledging that those less wild areas of the moor can be far better managed if only vested interests were replaced by pragmatism and compromise. 

Lynne Roper

Mary Tavy