Say goodbye to the trees and the songbirds! Cleethorpes wood on course to become holiday park

Nature has not been allowed to stand in the way of development - the area where the first trees have been felled  

SOLID  progress has been made this spring on clearance of a long-established Cleethorpes-area woodland to make way for a holiday park.

Most of the trees are being felled to enable a Lincolnshire property entrepreneur  to develop  a  44-lodge holiday park, off Hewitts Avenue, adjacent to the Altyre Way car showrooms and  the Northern Powergrid sub station.

There is no reason why it should not be a very attractive scheme, though some might lament the loss of a songbird-rich woodland,  especially as tree-felling has been taking place during the nesting season.

Over the Easter weekend, a fewer summer-arriving warblers - chiefly Blackcaps and Chiffchaffs -  were still to be heard, as was a drumming Great Spotted Woodpecker, but these birds will all soon move on.

The project benefits from a long-term planning consent which was updated by North East Lincolnshire planners at a meeting in November 2023.      

How the same area looked last summer

The proposed lay-out of the lodges is indicated in this design submitted by Cleethorpes-based Hodson architects

The Grimsby News says: Woodland is so scarce in North East Lincolnshire that it is always saddening when it disappears, especially at such a sensitive time of the year for wildlife. But it not the end of the world. In recent years, surveys of this particular site’s birds have revealed neither  abundance, nor any species of particular scarcity. It may be that the recent felling activity is only a speeded-up equivalent of the sort of clearance carried out in a bygone age by creatures such as bison. According to ecologists, dense woodland is of far less biodiversity value than, say, an organic orchard. Fingers crossed, it may be that far from sounding the death-knell for nature at this particular site, the holiday park development may actually enhance it. Time will tell.