Earlier today I came across a tweet from Frack Off, referring to a new site they had occupied at Davyhulme, just 1 km or so away from the Barton Moss site.
A perusal of the Frack Off Twitter timeline reveals a couple more tweets relating to the same site:
The postcode referred to in the second of these can be seen on Google Maps, with the occupied site readily identified as the bare ground on the other side of the motorway.
So, another fracking site "defended" by the doughty ecowarriors of Frack Off eh?
Not quite. A report in the Manchester Evening News from 2012 suggests that the site has another purpose entirely:
[An] environmental permit has been granted for Peel Energy Ltd to operate Barton Renewable Energy Plant, a biomass combustion plant on the Davyhulme site near Barton Bridge.
And if you refer to the Peel Energy website, you can see that the Barton Renewable Energy Plant site is indeed the same one referred to in the Frack Off tweets. In other words, the megaminds at Frack Off seem to have managed to occupy a site earmarked for a renewable energy plant.
Whoops.
Bishop Hill
In the comments, we are pointed to this story in the Manchester Evening News, which suggests that the biomass plant and a coalbed methane site (i.e. probably not fracked) will be on adjacent sites, so I may be wrong here.