Don’t get your hopes up. We’ve been here before!
But the Earth has moved!
As you will see from the pictures below, construction work has started at Chapel Cross. The foundations are being laid for the mast and the equipment that will be required for the mobile phone mast for which planning permission was granted ages ago.
The mobile phone service has been commissioned by the Home Office so that emergency vehicles on the A39 will have a signal. Luccombe has been promised that a commercial mobile phone signal will be piggybacked on the Home Office mast.
The installation of the mast was delayed because it was too close to the chapel at Chapel Cross. If you have never spotted the said chapel it is not surprising. It is among the most unspectacular ruins in the country! But English Heritage felt that the shadow of a mobile phone mast should not darken it!
But that was not the only delay. AFTER planning permission was granted there was a requirement imposed for a “nature survey.”
Once the nature survey concluded that wildlife would not be negatively affected by the erection of the mast, there was another delay. A further survey was required of the route that would be taken by the fibre optic cable that will service the mast.
As Luccombe residents will recall, they were denied a mobile service when alleged bats in the belfry of St Mary’s and the presence of dead bodies in the church yard (spoiler alert – it’s a grave yard!) prompted official demands for bat and archeological surveys. The demand for surveys not only scuppered the contractors plans to provide a mobile phone service to the village, it also denied the church a potential income from the location of a mast on the tower.
Luccombe Parish Council has been working on securing a fast, fibre optic broadband connection to the village. This should be possible by extending the fibre optic cable from the Chapel Cross mast into the village. However, despite having asked Connecting Devon & Somerset, the government-funded body that is supposed to promote rural broadband rollout, to fund the proposal, the Parish Council has not had a response.
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