maintenance costs because it crosses over a public road. If the Parish Council is able to purchase the Bridge for £1 and convert it into a public footbridge across this increasingly busy road, it is likely that the funds necessary for the necessary building work could be obtained from various grants which only the Parish Council could apply for, so the Council is still waiting for an opportunity to make sure that the Bridge not only remains there, for all the reasons expressed by Horspath residents at the Public Inquiry in 2005, but that it can be put to a good future use at no great financial cost to the village community.

Delivered along with this Newsletter is a special questionnaire – a HOUSING NEEDS SURVEY- for every household to fill in and return by revised date of Friday 18th May using the FREEPOST envelope also supplied, whether or not there is anyone in the household in actual housing need. This survey is a necessary and obligatory first step in the Parish Council’s on-going project to establish a 3rd Affordable Housing Scheme in Horspath to provide for the needs of people with strong personal connections to Horspath who cannot otherwise afford to buy a house here now that housing on the open market has become so expensive. This survey is supported by both SODC and ORCC who will analyse the results, and then inform the Parish Council of these results, to confirm the needs of the village, in general terms, and anonymously - so that there is absolutely no reference to any residents’ names. The general results will be posted on the website.
 

The Parish Council, together with the Horspath Village Hall charity and the Horspath Village Sports Association, are proposing a major £1.6 million development of the facilities for sport and recreation in the village, which can only happen if it is supported by such funds as the Lottery. This project would involve the eventual demolition of the Scout Hut and the building of a state-of-the-art, purpose-built, energy-efficient double-sided sports pavilion with changing rooms, and the establishment of a new sports field on the Oxford side of the Village Hall. The details of this evolving plan are explained elsewhere in the Newsletter, but a low-cost beginning has been made by the planting of 120 new trees in the Bowley Field, and a further 300 trees have been requested from SODC for planting there next winter.

Horspath won the Best Kept Village Competition and was then chosen as the Winner of the Winners Class in the Best Kept Village Competition last year. We did not enter this year, partly because the

competition format has now been changed, and partly because we had only recently won all we could possibly win, due in part to the continued efforts made by everyone in the village to look after their own property, partly by the Council’s own programme for the maintenance of the public areas, and especially due to Mr. & Mrs Tasker who have shown the way by their own example of how everyone can help to keep litter to a minimum.

In the new Burial Ground, the path of concrete slabs to the area used most recently for burials became unstable and the Council received complaints that the unevenly settling slabs constituted a ‘trip hazard.’ Very reluctantly the Council, recognising that it had a legal responsibility to remove a hazard to public Health & Safety, arranged for a large section of these recently laid slabs to be removed and stacked in the Burial Ground pending use elsewhere. The grass has since been restored and re-seeded by Robert Gray.

The Wildlife Conservation Area is now in its 8th year as a very successful and popular village project, supported by the Parish Council and by a team of volunteers who have used their various skills to make this Area a very pleasant place for an interesting walk in the heart of the village. The 2-year drought not only dried out the ponds last summer, but also the clay which is underneath them, but they are now replenished with enough water to see this year’s crop of many thousands of tadpoles come through to maturity and leave the pond as little frogs in July. The population of bats hibernating in the tunnel continues to grow, and some more ‘bat furniture’ was installed by Bob Hamlet and many other volunteers. The Area now attracts several thousand visits by local people every year, particularly dog-walkers, and in the recent wet winter, the top section of the ‘circular path’ became too slippery for most of them, and so it will be re-surfaced this spring with about 10 tonnes of gravel bought by the Parish Council.

   

The renovated Village Hall Children’s Play Area continues to be heavily used, to the great delight of many young children and their families in the village, but the costs to the community of repairing mindless criminal vandalism by a few rather older people to the adjacent Village Hall building have again amounted to £5,000. The actual bills were kept low because Brian Mayling and Bob Hamlet organised some volunteer working parties to do some of the repairs and maintenance, but it is inevitable that the Police will now need to be more involved in identifying and bringing to court those responsible for causing the criminal damage.

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