The ‘prettiest village in England' launches war on drones

Residents of Castle Combe in the Cotswolds, known as 'the prettiest village in England,' are calling for a ban on tourist drones after incidents of privacy invasion, including one report of a resident being filmed while taking a bath.
'No drone zone' signs have been posted across the village, including on homes, the local church, and the public car park, due to constant drone flights over gardens and streets.
A retired police officer, Hilary Baker, reported that some visitors have lost their moral compass, recounting incidents of drones hovering over gardens and near bathroom windows, leading to verbal abuse when residents ask pilots to stop.
Police were called last month on a drone pilot who verbally abused locals and allegedly filmed children playing in a back garden; Wiltshire Council has since put up signs warning drone pilots about violating privacy guidelines.
A survey by the parish council chairman, Fred Winup, revealed that over half of tourists visit Castle Combe after seeing it online, with many influenced by social media posts on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, leading to increased drone usage and privacy concerns.

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Telegraph

27 minutes ago

• Telegraph

RAF base's only defence against Palestine Action was 6ft wooden fence

For almost 80 years, RAF Brize Norton has been one of the country's most important military airfields, serving as an embarkation point for members of the Royal family and senior politicians as they fly around the globe. So one could be forgiven for expecting security around the Oxfordshire airbase to be watertight. In reality, however, things are a little more porous, with sections of the eight-mile perimeter protected only by a six-foot wooden fence that would not look out of place surrounding a suburban garden. In the early hours of Friday morning, two members of the protest group Palestine Action – which will now be proscribed as a terrorist organisation – took advantage of the seemingly lax defences to enter the airfield and attack two military aircraft. Video footage posted by the group showed two people using electric scooters to cross the base's runway. One can be seen approaching an aircraft and spray-painting its engine, before driving away down the empty airstrip. They were then able to disappear into the night, leaving the RAF red-faced and the Ministry of Defence to announce an urgent review of security. Brize Norton serves as the hub for UK strategic air transport and refuelling, including flights to RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus. It is also where the aircraft used by dignitaries, including the monarch and prime minister, are based. As would be expected, large parts of the base, especially near the gates, are surrounded by high metal fences topped with menacing-looking razor wire. The perimeter in these areas also bristles with security cameras and hi-tech CCTV to monitor the comings of goings of all personnel. Armed guards patrol the gates in a show of strength aimed at deterring anyone who has no lawful business. But just a short stroll along a grass verge, the barbed wire comes to an abrupt end, to be replaced by a panel fence that looks like it could have been purchased from a DIY store. The section in question is plain to see for anyone travelling the four miles between the villages of Carterton and Bampton along station road. Stretching for around 170 metres, it skirts along the end of the runway and is protected from the road by just a small line of wooden and concrete bollards. One resident said: 'I've lived in this area for years and every time I drive past the fence I think: 'That would be easy to break into'.' It is not topped with barbed wire or any other anti-climbing defences, and would provide little resistance to a determined terrorist with a spring in their step. There is even a hole in the fence at one point for anyone who cannot quite manage the climb. Red warning signs attached to the fence declare: 'No unauthorised access. Protected site under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005. Trespass on this site is a Criminal Offence. This site is also regulated by military bylaws.' At one end of the section, kennels belonging to the RAF Police's dog section are located. But, while a number of RAF Police vehicles were parked close by, there were no visible personnel patrols on Friday afternoon during the three hours that reporters from The Telegraph were at the site. On the other side of the fence, and just a short distance from the road, Airbus Voyager aircraft, the air-to-air refuellers targeted by Palestine Action, can be seen on the tarmac. Security for the Brize Norton airfield is the responsibility of the RAF Police and Military Provost Guard Service (MPGS), which secures Army, Navy and RAF bases. But former members have suggested the unit is poorly funded and does not have the resources to effectively secure such large sites. One RAF source told The Telegraph the level of security across all military was not up to standard, and that 'more dogs, more coppers and more money' was needed to properly secure the sensitive sites. 'We have barbed wire around the bases and cameras, but is its perimeter fence completely covered for the miles it takes up?' the source said. 'No, because Brize Norton is f---ing huge.' He added: 'If we could have another 50 coppers and 50 dogs the security at Brize Norton would improve. But is the security as tight at a fast jet base? Not really. 'To have watertight security at a base like Brize Norton, you'd have to invest countless people and god knows the amount of money. But maybe that's what we have to do now if this is the way things are going.' The source added: 'MPGS are responsible for recruiting the right people and getting them in the right places, but they haven't done that. ' It's a symptom of a lack of investment on security. We don't have tens of millions of pounds to put up CCTV across all the bases.' Another former military source added: 'The security at these non-nuclear bases can be very patchy. The perimeter fences are too long to be able to have them under surveillance 24 hours a day. 'But when Glastonbury's fence is harder to breach than RAF Brize Norton, you know you have an issue. 'While it may be challenging to secure an entire eight-mile perimeter, you would think they ought to be able to protect aircraft sitting on the runway. Someone's head is going to have to roll over this.'

The Guardian

28 minutes ago

• The Guardian

The seagulls have landed: why gulls are encroaching on our towns

'They're a menace,' says Jenny Riley, shooting a wary glance at the gulls whirling above her beach hut near the pier in Lowestoft, Suffolk, as she shelters from the hot afternoon sun with her friend Angela Forster. The two older women have each had a hut on this stretch of powdery white sand for decades, and often eat sandwiches or fish and chips there, but as in many places on Britain's coast, it can be a perilous pastime. 'The birds are really vicious,' says Riley. 'If you're eating anything, you more or less have to go in to the hut or they'll take it from your hand. 'This is the worst summer I have known for seagulls, and I've lived my whole life in this place,' Riley adds, and her friend agrees: 'The mess and the smell in our town now is dreadful.' Is there anything they would like to see happen? 'Cull them,' says Forster. 'Although I wouldn't like to see them go completely – after all, they are the seaside.' Their sense of decades-long decline in a town whose fishing industry has almost vanished since the 1960s is perhaps not a surprise – but when it comes to the gull numbers, the women are not wrong. Local experts estimate the town's herring gull numbers at 10,000 – or 15% of its human population – though the birds' numbers are hard to calculate. Lowestoft's more visible gull problem, however, is its kittiwakes, another gull species whose population has grown from a single breeding pair in the 1950s to more than 1,000 nests today, splodged messily on to window sills, architraves and shopfronts throughout the town centre and leaving anyone passing underneath at risk of a foul-smelling guano splat. And this is not just a problem for Lowestoft. All over Britain, and coastal areas in Europe and the US, communities are in a flap about seagulls. North Yorkshire council is developing what it calls a gull management strategy in response to increasing complaints of 'gull mugging attacks' in towns from Scarborough to Whitby. In Lyme Regis, Dorset, authorities have introduced a public space protection order (PSPO) banning the feeding of birds to deter swooping herring gulls, having also tried flying drones and birds of prey to scare them away. The Highland council recently conducted a census of the birds to feed into its own management plans as herring gull numbers in Inverness and elsewhere soar. It is illegal, otherwise, to harm or capture any wild bird or interfere with its nest. Nevertheless, in March the former Scottish Tory leader, Douglas Ross, called on the Scottish parliament to give people licenses to kill gulls, mentioning other Scottish councils that had spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on the problem 'to no effect'. Put to a newspaper poll, two-thirds agreed. If it can seem at times that seagulls are taking over British towns, the fact is that their numbers aren't rising at all – they are falling sharply. 'Seagulls', in fact, don't really exist – the term is a catchall for 50 species of gull worldwide, six of which are commonly found in the UK. Of these, both the kittiwake and herring gull are 'red listed', meaning their breeding populations have experienced perilous drops in recent decades; while other species including the great and lesser black-backed gulls and the (now misnamed) common gull are on the amber list, meaning moderate but still concerning decline. In some traditional coastal nesting sites, the most recent national seabird census found, the populations have all but collapsed. South Walney nature reserve in Cumbria had more than 10,000 herring gulls' nests in 1999 and just 444 in 2020, a drop of 96%, according to Dr Viola Ross-Smith, a gull expert at the British Trust for Ornithology. The crash in numbers of lesser black-backed gulls at the same site was even greater, at 98%. Why? Alongside the wider biodiversity crisis, say experts, it's partly because Britain's gulls are moving into town. 'When we talk about urban gulls, not only in coastal communities or towns but also increasingly in large urban centres, it's about recognising that these birds are moving,' says Helen F Wilson, a professor of geography at Durham university whose work focuses on the social and cultural geography of humans and other species sharing the same space. 'It's not that they're increasing in number, but they are shifting away from where we might have expected to see them.' There are lots of possible reasons for that she says – warming seas, falls in their prey species, changing in fishing practices, more violent winter storms. Rather than seeing gulls as malign dive-bombers that are after our chips, in other words, we ought perhaps to consider their vulnerability. 'We need to think about what [their growth in towns and cities] tells us about what is happening elsewhere,' she says. 'Because for whatever reason, these birds are now finding urban environments much better than the coast.' They are also just carrying out their natural behaviour. 'We often describe herring gulls in very sinister ways: they're cool, calculating, muggers, cannibalistic – these very moral ways of talking about them. But what we're actually describing is natural behaviour, whether that's protecting a nest or simply feeding. Herring gulls snatch food from other birds in the wild, so it stands to reason that they would take things from people's hands.' Ross-Smith agrees. Herring gulls, for instance, can be especially aggressive – she prefers 'aggressively defensive' – while their chicks are fledging, 'but I wish people understood that the gull is merely being a very protective parent'. 'We are part of an ecosystem, and we're in a biodiversity crisis, and I think we need to be a bit more tolerant of the other species around us,' she says. As well as big environmental stresses, each town has specific local factors that may have encouraged gulls to settle. In Inverness, for example, the closure of a nearby landfill site in 2005 was one of the drivers of a very sharp increase in the city centre, according to David Haas, a senior community development manager for the Highland council. Having previously reduced the number of nests by physically removing eggs (under license), they have now moved to a range of non-lethal deterrents including the use of lasers, sonar and hawks. 'As we changed over to these methods, it's caused a lot of angst amongst people, understandably,' says Hass. They are also mindful that birds shooed from the town centre may simply move to the suburbs, 'and we have had evidence of that, where they're going into residential areas and causing a bit of mayhem in certain spots. But we're addressing that too. It's work in progress.' Similarly, the initial migration of Lowestoft's kittiwakes from its docks to its main shopping street and beyond followed the demolition of a derelict structure on which a small number of pairs were happily nesting. Finding town centre ledges even more to their liking than the cliff sides where they naturally roost, their numbers had reached 430 nests by 2018, then 650 in 2021, and more than 1,000 today, according to Dick Houghton, a retired fisheries scientist who now unofficially monitors the birds. 'And there are thousands of sites in the town where they could nest,' he says. Steam-cleaning kittiwake dung – a pungent brew, given the birds' diet of sand eels and herring sprat – from the pavement below Lowestoft's nesting sites is now a daily task, costing East Sussex council £50,000 a year, according to Kerry Blair, the council's strategic director. 'That's difficult to sustain in the current financial environment, but we can't not do it,' he says. Lowestoft, too, has experimented with nest removal and egg oiling (which stops them developing) in the past, 'but we've come a long way in terms of understanding our responsibilities', says Blair. That's included learning about the birds themselves, he says. Unlike other gulls, kittiwakes don't snatch food, and spend their winters out to sea in the North Atlantic, allowing old nests to be removed each winter. But they also like to nest in the same spot each year. So if they can't access that spot next year, it doesn't mean they'll fly back out to sea – they'll simply move to the next available windowsill along. It has led to the recognition that the birds aren't going anywhere, so people will have to learn new ways of living with them, says Blair. Rather than merely ousting the birds from their facades, for instance, building owners are now encouraged to build bespoke nesting ledges for them on more discreet walls away from public footpaths. A row of simple wooden ledges drilled to the side of a BT building now houses as many as 120 kittiwake nests, leaving the public space free of their mess. 'That's the journey that the council has been on,' says Blair. 'The Lowestoft kittiwake, when we started to look at [the issue], was about the dirt on the pavement, but it's turned into something else … It's about trying to see it as an amazing gift, really, to have these very endearing creatures living among us. Yes, it brings a few problems. Let's deal with all those problems and learn to love them living alongside us. That's a journey, I think, and more people than you'd expect in this town are starting to feel the same.'

The Guardian

31 minutes ago

• The Guardian

My son has taken my boots. Well, at least one of them

A few years ago someone asked me to write a quick 300 words on 'bin shoes' – dedicated footwear you leave by the door to put out the bins. At the time I was experiencing a degree of sloth I decided to dress up as indignation: I emailed back saying I knew nothing of so-called bin shoes, that I had one pair of stout boots that served me in all circumstances. This was more or less true – I'm on my sixth pair of identical pull-on ankle boots, which suit both formal and informal occasions, and all seasons. I wear them on long hikes, even though I probably shouldn't, and I slip them on late at night, without socks, when I have forgotten to put out the bins. Of course I do own other shoes, including some classic branded trainers that were deeply fashionable when I was nine, but which my mother would not buy me, presenting me instead with suspect lookalikes. 'They're supposed to have three stripes,' I said. 'These have four.' 'A bonus stripe,' my mother said. 'These are bobos,' I said, using my peer group's common slang for cheap knock-off trainers. 'What's the difference?' she said. The difference, I explained, was that when I went to school in them the other children would gather round me and sing 'Bobos, they make your feet feel fine/Bobos, they cost a dollar ninety-nine…' to the tune of the Colonel Bogey March. My mother thought this was hilarious. Anyway, last autumn my middle son let it be known that his work shoes had worn out, and that he was seeking an all-purpose footwear solution. 'What about Dad's boots?' my wife said. The middle one leaned over the kitchen table to examine my feet. 'They're very versatile,' I said. 'Yeah, maybe,' he said, frowning a little. 'I've worn these babies to funerals,' I said. 'And I've worn them to the beach.' In spite of his reservations, my wife bought him a pair. He was so pleased with them that she gave our other two sons a pair each for Christmas. For a short period I considered myself an intergenerational influencer, before the trouble started. The first time it happens I'm on my way to the shops when I notice something disquieting about my gait. I feel graceless, rackety and slow. It's just age, I tell myself, but I'm still out of sorts when I reach the front door, where I am greeted by the middle one standing in his socks. 'Are you wearing my boots?' he says. 'No,' I say looking down. 'Yes, you are,' he says, 'and I need to go to Birmingham.' 'Wow, they really are identical,' I say. 'Actually I did notice something weird when I …' 'Take them off,' he says. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Weeks later the oldest one moves back home, and promptly sets off for work in my boots, leaving me his size 10s, which fall off when I walk. 'Didn't they feel tight to you?' I say when he comes home that evening. 'They did, yeah,' he says. 'What are they, like size 8?' '8½,' I say. 'I'm actually a 9, but I know from experience they run big.' A week after that I'm late for a recording session with the band I'm in. When I go to leave the house I find a single pair of black boots by the front door: one 8½, one 10. 'He hasn't,' I say. But evidently he has. Coincidentally, the day before my classic branded trainers had split a seam, so the toe of the right one hung open, slack-jawed. I can't wear those, I think. Nor can I wear two boots of markedly different sizes, even though my son apparently can. Upstairs in my cupboard I find a pair of Slovakian canvas sneakers my wife once bought me. There is, I think, nothing else for it. As we sit in the recording studio listening to the drummer add extra cymbal crashes to a track, the guitar player turns and looks me over. 'This is a new style for you, isn't it?' he says. I look down at myself. I have on a densely patterned half-sleeved shirt I found in my holiday luggage, and shoes that might accurately be described as bobos. 'You appear to think of me as someone who doesn't have summer looks,' I say, 'but I have summer looks.' 'I wasn't criticising,' he says. 'I've got lightweight knits,' I say. 'I've got structured linens. ' My phone pings – my oldest son's reply to my recent text. 'I'm wearing trainers,' he writes. 'All the boots are in the house.' As I look down at my feet an ancient tune threads through my head: 'Bobos, they're made for hoboes, so get your bobos for hoboes today.'