Letters: Is Two Jags’ handout really that fantastic?

PHILIP Broadbent-Yale, of the National Trust, is reported as describing the latest £1m handout to Wicken Fen from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (occupied by John Prescott), as 'fantastic news'. I beg to differ.

Will some be used to pursue the proposed and so-called Bridge of Reeds?, a structure with as much apparent artistic merit as Tracey Emin's bed and little more use, to be constructed at colossal expense over the A14 near Stow cum Quy.

The trust is set on buying up and partially flooding some 10,000 acres of the highest-grade and most productive agricultural land in Swaffham and the neighbouring Fens, but what about global warming?

The now-much-talked-of possibility of rising sea levels by some 16 feet during the next 100 years, a phenomenon which might have the effect of putting under water much of Cambridgeshire, substantial areas of the rest of East Anglia, and a large part of London, as well as turning huge regions of the world into areas like Bangladesh, should be considered by all concerned.

If the effects of global warming are to be anything like what some scientists are presently predicting, the expenditure of any money by The National Trust on land-buying and/or bridge-building in this area is not only a total waste but also utterly irrelevant to the trust's other interest, it being probable that these Fens could form a new and large inlet of The North Sea, with such as Anglesey Abbey and the lower parts of the City of Cambridge in water-bound ruin, and with wave surges threatening the approaches to Ely Cathedral.

Far from these foolish schemes, either by the trust or by Two Jags' Prescott, it is us who need some money right now - for a new Noah's Ark!

GEOFFREY WOOLARD

Upware

Ely