Residents fighting a controversial planning application proposing a housing development on a green field site are reporting that it was the scene of a sinkhole 25 years ago and should not be built upon.

There are reports that the cavity, which was thirteen feet across and thirteen feet deep, was later filled in with building waste, but there is still a visible scar. Wallace Moon, who has lived in a cottage adjoining the Chilcompton field for the last 67 years, remembers how the hole literally appeared overnight.

Sinkholes have been much in the news recently, as a car in Buckinghamshire was swallowed up by a thirty foot deep hole earlier in the month. In the same week, there was a BBC Horizon programme about sinkholes in Florida, US.

The proposed development of thirty houses has already caused outrage across the village, with residents packing into a Chilcompton Parish Council meeting and letters of objection pouring into Mendip District Council.

Local people say that the entrance to the development would be on an already notoriously difficult and dangerous S-bend. There is a real concern that the village is being overdeveloped to the extent of unsustainability, in particular, the local school is at saturation level. Parish Councillor, David Thwaites, said: "The sustainability and traffic issues are clearly important and in terms of overdevelopment, this could be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

"But what is most significant is that this is a development that threatens the very identity of Chilcompton. It is those few green fields and the county border, between here and Midsomer Norton, which makes us the distinct and independent village we are."

This is one planning application that Chilcompton residents are hoping will be disappearing down the proverbial plughole.

M. Rigby