Silent Victories bike tour: Day Six

The traffic island on the almost-island of Portland had become a temporary protest camp. Tents became billboards, “Food not Fuel”, and the Kelly Kettle was boiling water for a tea round. Twenty or so bikes were stacked against a landscaped flowerbed, and the bike-towed sound system competed with the noise of cars. Now the site had been set up, people milled about in the sun, organising the next day’s cycling, or prepared for workshops and meetings later in the day. I sat resting against a stone pillar set up in the centre of the roundabout, a monument to nothing but itself, listening to the conversation of local residents and activists.

“The new government are reviewing the subsides, we’re hoping we can block it there. It can’t run without subsides. There’s people with no jobs here, they’re cutting public services, and the government want to give money to this?”

The bike tour stopped by in Portland to support a local anti-biofuel campaign, No to Oil Palm Energy (NOPE). Planning permission has been granted for a 17MW palm oil-fired power station to be built, despite overwhelming opposition of the local population. Some people objected to the smoke that would pollute the local air. The plant would be at sea level, and even with a tall chimneystack, smoke would be emitted at a level lower than much of the residential area. Others were more concerned about the palm oil plantations that would need to be half the size of Dorset to keep the fuel supply coming, for the same amount of electricity that could be produced by about 18 wind turbines. The port authority stands to gain considerably from the development, and their profit comes at the expense of the islanders feeling disenfranchised about what goes on in their own back yard. The local council seems powerless to oppose the scheme, which feels like an imposition that no-one on the island will benefit from.

“It’s such a Victorian attitude. It’s like what they did with the prison – just stick it on Portland, out of the way. We’ve got big social problems here, and the planning system is just bonkers. People want to come here for the history, the extreme landscapes. We have rock climbers from all over Europe coming here because they can see the wrecks from the cliffs. But they’re determined to ruin it. They treat us like a dumping ground for things they don’t want in Weymouth.”

Later in the day, two councillors crossed the road to meet the protesters. The two grey-haired, well-dressed women were eager to talk, despite their repeated claims of how busy they were and how they really must dash soon. They told me about how a local green space that had been given to Portland by the Queen herself was being built over as part of a new housing development. The harbour is to be host to the 2012 sailing events, and local democratic voices have been overruled by the Olympic’s metropolitan interests. The same thing was happening with the power station. But she disagreed with the protesters’ alternative. “There was a plan to put wind turbines all along the causeway. But they were just too big. It was out of proportion. So no, I can’t agree with that. What we need here is wave power.”

Three protesters had positioned themselves on the central reservation leading up to the roundabout from the mainland. They had a banner that read “Beep Against Biofuels”, and the motorists’ support grew with the advancing rush-hour. When the stream of cars was reduced to a trickle, we packed up our panniers and trailers, and set off up the hill to the St George’s community centre, for dinner and a meeting.

The community centre was built like an upturned ship, the roof’s beams curved into a hull, and the oak joists as dark as pitched timber. But the walls of the centre were made of great blocks of hewn Portland stone, weighing a tonne each easily. It was as if, if it could, the whole island would pack itself up and sail away from the Victorian causeway mooring it to the mainland. After a short struggle to get the PA to work, and a large plate of curry followed by fruit salad had been consumed, the previous day’s journey was beginning to take its toll on the cyclists. The wind, rain and fog that had blanketed the route from Tinker’s Bubble to Portland had stayed with us overnight, disturbing our sleep in wind-tossed tents. It looked like tonight might be just as windy, and we had a long ride to look forward to the next day. The day of relative rest had given our muscles a chance to complain. Tiredness was kicking in.

But there was no time for relaxation yet. Local supporters had come together to share an internet link-up with activists in Columbia who had been driven off their land by palm oil companies, but had fought back and successfully retaken their village. It was a chance for the whole story of palm oil to be told, from plantation to power station. Using a translator, a Columbian activist told the story of his community, and answered questions from the Portland residents. At one point the hall full of people were listening so attentively that the Columbians worried that they were talking to an empty room. For about a minute afterwards we wouldn’t have been able to hear anything he said past the eruption cheering, clapping, stamping and table banging.

Silent Victories Bike tour, day 7

My group arrived at Ottery late. The slow July sun was about to set, and the day was giving up to dusk. We still had our camp to set up and dinner to cook over a fire for which we had to collect wood. The common is a public place, but more used to teenagers drinking cider than thirty camping cyclists at this time of night. It was a long, wide strip of land running from the old A30 bridge, alongside the river, to a copse. We camped in the far corner, near the trees. An early group had got the train to give themselves time to buy food and start a fire. Our guests for the evening had already arrived. Veterans of the 1990s anti-roads protests, they were chatting to the cooks and helping to set up the camp.

After two days camping on Portland and then a 50-mile cycle sharing a trailer full of equipment, I was desperate for a wash. My skin was thick with three days worth of accumulated sun cream and grime from the road, and my hair was moulded into the ridges of my helmet. Excusing myself from food preparations, I scrabbled through my panniers to find soap and a towel, and headed down to the river.

After picking my way through nettles bent over under the weight of hand-sized leaves to the bankside, I was out of site of the camp, but in plain view of the dog walkers on the footbridge. It doesn’t take long to lose your inhibitions when camping. I stripped off my road clothes and waded in, still hot from the journey. The pebbly riverbed was soft with silt. Long, swaying strands of weed swept against my legs, the lazy hair of sleeping water nymphs. I imagine dragonfly larvae preying amongst the swathes, soon to emerge and be reborn as electric blue and neon green acrobats, dancing in the yellowflags and bulrushes. I submerged myself entirely before I lost my nerve, I was a fish, a frog, an otter, cool and clean.

Later, around the fire, Chris and Gill told me stories from the road protests and the village set up in treetops and tunnels along the A30 site. About how one guy drowned crossing the river, when everyone thought he was crying wolf. About the protesters who concreted their arms into barrels packed with gas cylinders, so the bailiffs couldn’t use power tools to get them out. How one woman locked herself, naked, to the top of a tree. “In the end,” Gill told me, “the police were a blessing, really. It had been going on for so long, this was peoples’ lives. emotions got so high on both sides that without the police someone would have got seriously hurt”. Chris looked unconvinced. The sound of the A30 is a constant background to life now. Chris is sure that this section of the road was surfaced with concrete out of spite, to make it nosier where people put up most resistance. “It’s like with Swampy’s tree. They didn’t need to chop that one down, it was 30 yards from the road. A huge old oak tree. But they chopped it down and then cut it into three different pieces, and sent it to three different sawmills.” His mouth smirks behind a thick beard as he rolls up a cigarette. “But we got the last laugh in the end. We got a government arts grant to find all the pieces and use them to build a monument to Swampy. So they paid for it to be chopped down and then they paid for it to be put back up again.”

The next day, after satisfying the local PCSO that we weren’t setting up a travellers’ camp, I left with a small group to go take a diversion from out route and go to see the A30 site. We patronised the toilets in the new, two-storey Sainsbury’s construction site before leaving Ottery, following a route that was so familiar to the protesters who had made good friends in the local community. Max hadn’t been back since the protest was broken up. Finding the A30 was easy enough, but it was impossible it was impossible to work out where the camps had been. We stood on a bridge, looking down on the road, over the new valley that it cut through hillsides, woods, and fields, as strong and indiscriminate as a glacier, as focussed as a river, gouging a canyon out of soft earth. The river of cars flowed continuously with the rushing white noise of a waterfall, the sound of water on rocks mimicked and parodied by tyres on concrete. I imagined the road cutting deeper and deeper into the hillside like a river running between mountains. But this was sterile riverbed, where no fish swim, where no nymphs prey, and no otters paddle in secret, where the only water is the black and toxic run-off that poisons the banks with salt and soot, before being flushed away down storm-drains, into rivers.

Chris and Gill’s daughter, Maddie, had invited up to the education centre inEscottParkwhere she worked. It was on the estate of the landowner who had quietly supported the protesters when they set up camp in his woods 14 years ago, and whose land is now divided by the road. Maddie had told my last night how you can hear the road all over the site. “Sometimes you forget you can hear it in the background for hours, but then you remember and there’s nothing you can do to make it go away again.”

The education centre is a reconstructed Saxon village, with thatched roundhouse, pole-lathe workshop, iron smithy, clay firing pit, falconry centre, herd of wild boar, and flourmill. Groups of school children come for full-immersion history lessons, and teachers come for forest school training programmes. For one local primary school, the 3ft deep swamp walk has become a rite of passage for year 2s. Maddie is in charge of a trio of work experience students this week, and has been widening and re-swampifying the swamp walk with them. She took some time out to show us around. As we walked round the pre-modern village and through the woods to see Swampy’s tree sculpture, and were introduced to staff dressed in Saxon clothes, I did almost forget the sound of the road. But not quite. It stayed on the edge of my consciousness, like the smell of last night’s fire lingered on my clothes, and I couldn’t hide from it.

Maddie couldn’t tell us exactly where the protest camps were either. She would only have been a year 2 herself when they were evicted. We filled out water bottles from the village’s piped supply of spring water and said goodbye, and I realised that the A30 protest site wasn’t the depressing place I had expected. Life had gone on despite the road, and as well as the noise of cars and lorries, there was the latest group of year 4s watching a falconry display, and the resident Saxons building a new roundhouse. We left Escott and cycled back over the A30, where the river of cars was still flowing, and still seemed as endless and inevitable as a river, and down, past Ottery, towards the sea.