Sir, A letter (June 16) makes two unsupported assumptions about the campaign to save the Trap Grounds. First, the writers question the environmental value of the scrubland, apparently unaware that its wildlife population includes glow worms, lizards, water voles, badgers, deer, bats, and many birds on the Oxfordshire Biodiversity Challenge list.

Oxford city cannot afford to lose such a rich resource, especially since the intensive suburbanisation of the canal banks. Local people have used the Trap Grounds for recreation mostly walking and bird-watching since 1975, and evidence to that effect persuaded the inspector at a public inquiry in 2002 to recommend its registration as a town green. The scrubland is somewhat overgrown, but sensitive management by the Countryside Services team (as at Iffley Fields) would increase the access for a wider range of users.

Second, your correspondents question the level of community support for the campaign. As a matter of fact, defending our claim through the High Court, the Court of Appeal, and the House of Lords has cost us approximately £48,000. Apart from a donation of £10,000 from the Open Spaces Society, our funds consist mainly of small donations from local people. (Incidentally, how much public money has been expended by the city and county councils, which initiated the judicial process and hired expensive teams of top QCs?) As for the presumed need for a road across the Trap Grounds to give access to the adjacent (badly sited) school, your correspondents seem content for the current well-controlled route to be replaced by a road through a dense housing development to the north (where none of them happens to live). Such a road, linking with Navigation Way, could not be built without substantial damage to the wildlife of the reedbed and the scrubland.

Catherine Robinson, Oxford