PLANS by the Government or local authorities to build a new high-speed link road between Oxford and Cambridge are just not needed.

A large numbers of travellers fails to justify the huge cost and the Otmoor route destruction of vast irreplaceable wildlife and naturally growing plants and trees.

There is also the acute danger of many accidents due to the very dense fogs that envelopes Otmoor in autumn and early spring, so dense that visibility can be down to less than 10ft.

Having been brought up at the edge of this enormous, mainly wetland area, Otmoor was my playground and teacher of nature.

During the 1950s the Army spent almost a year searching and clearing thousands of unexploded bombs left from World War Two when Otmoor was used by the RAF as a practise bombing range every night except Sundays.

Talking to the Army personnel doing this task, they could not guarantee that all bombs were cleared as some lay buried deep in the permanent wet area.

Besides these possible dangers is the destruction of so many species of butterflies, moths and rare insects not found anywhere else in the UK. I often met my late friend Gordon Ushaw to spot and note the many species of birds and wildlife regularly seen on Otmoor.

St Joseph’s stone is a particularly interesting large rock set in the corner of a field known as One Hundred Acres.

The successful campaign in this newspaper to push the M40 route away from the centre of Otmoor must be repeated to prevent this latest unwanted intrusion of nature. Please add your name to the campaign by emailing me at tayloradrian44@yahoo.co.uk

ADRIAN TAYLOR
Duncan Close, Eynsham