Its now nearly three years since the great travellers site panic gripped the village when a family of new age travellers sought permission to establish a permanent site at Oak Lane in order to pursue their business which revolved around providing facilities for festivalgoers aas I recall. The village talked of nothing else for weeks and anonymous leaflets were circulated issuinf dire warnings about the possibility of drugs being brought into the primary school amongst other things. The panic culminated in the biggrst public meeting the village had seen in years where there was massive opposition to the planned devolopment.
In the end, the planning application was withdrawn, resubmitted and eventually rejected. The travellers continued to have a trucj on the land they owned and, despite some occasional grumbligs from their immediate neighbour village life returned to normal.
All this was centred well outside the village itself but I await with interest to see what would happen if some other perceived threat came on the scens, Inevitably, one day, we shall have a practising Muslim family move into the village and I wonder how long it woukd be before we have anonymous l;eaflets doing the rounds speculating about a mosque being built on the hall site, The parish Council being replaced by a sharia court and the possibility of classes for suicide bombers being held in The Dorothy Grainger Room. We should probably have the local readers of The Daily Star setting up a branch of The English Defence League as that publication seems to give that particular brand of scum uncritical coverage.
What all this tells us is that pleasent villages like Silverton have an unfortunate tendenct ro attract people with a deep fear of a changing world and a wish to return to an agr of simple certainties. Luckily, we still have a majority still able to keep a sense of perspective about such matters.
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