Pentney is used to the noise and racket that goes hand in hand with aviation. Existing as it does only four kilometres from the largest and busiest front line RAF station in the country, the village is regularly awakened by the sound of jets screaming overhead, but we're much less used to the sound of hovering and slowly drifting helicopters first thing in the morning. But that's exactly the sound that Pentney awoke to this morning (Friday 20th July 2008).

At first glance, it appeared to be a police helicopter. A dark blue Squirrel helicopter with some sort of camera apparatus attached to the nose. Even the slow drifting nature of it's maneuvering was indicative of a police chopper keeping an eye on something. In fact it looked like they were keeping an eye on something happening within the MIN93 site. So, with my curiosity peaked, I grabbed my camera and hopped on my bike to investigate.

I found the helicopter hovering near to a power pylon over in the western half of the MIN93 site, and on closer inspection, it turned out to be a National Grid helicopter.
I watched it for a while, and took some photos as it went about it's business, all the while observing to see what it was up to. It seems to be doing a survey or inspection of the power pylons that run across the MIN93 site.

Now I understand that National Grid regularly use helicopters to carry out this sort of work, but I would have thought that a routine inspection would have involved checking the entire route of the power line.
This inspection seems to have only covered a short 1km stretch of the line. The stretch that runs across our MIN93 site. To be precise, the four pylons that will be immediately affected if this quarry goes ahead.
So it would seem reasonable to assume that this inspection was in some way connected with the quarry proposal.

Was this inspection being carried out to assess the condition of the pylons prior to quarrying, so that any subsequent damage can be attributed to the workings?
Or was this a preliminary survey of the pylons in order to assess the feasibility of re-siting or re-routing them?

I have written to National Grid to ask if they'll shed some light on their activities here today. Hopefully they'll be more prepared to talk to us than most other large organisations have been in the past.