Engineers from Shropshire Council are closing Harley Bank once again to try and figure out why rocks keep falling onto the road.

I’m not an engineer so I might be looking at this simplistically but I wonder if cutting into the rock face and turning it into a sheer cliff and removing all the trees might have some bearing on the sudden severe instability of the rock face?

My family have lived in the area for generations and my nan remembers the council employing someone to take a wheelbarrow down the road daily and clear up the stones that had fallen onto the road.

In more recent times the rock face has appeared more stable, I have seen rocks on the road once, maybe twice and travelled it hundreds of times.  But the council must have had a few million burning a hole in their pockets because they decided to “improve” the rock face, the upshot of which is that the road is closing again tomorrow for the fourth time in less than a year (the first time was a week or so after the work was done).

It wouldn’t be so bad if it was a road in an urban area where there are alternative routes that don’t involve a 30 minute diversion but this is rural Shropshire and Harley Bank is a major route.  It also doesn’t help my sister and brother-in-law who run the Plume of Feathers at the foot of the hill because there is no passing traffic when the road is closed and the unofficial diversions from the closest town are still at least 15 minutes of country roads which doesn’t exactly encourage people to make the effort to go to a pub.

Technorati Tags: Shropshire, Much Wenlock, Harley Bank, Plume of Feathers