Parish Council Tues 7th at 7.30pm Village Hall Village Hall C'tte Mon 13th at 8pm Village Hall Mobile Library Fri 24th at 2.40pm Phone Box Tai Chi Wednesdays at 7pm Village Hall
The last Parish Council Meeting was held on 3 December 2024.
Gaydon Churchyard
Official notice was given that burials in St Giles' churchyard had been discontinued. Cllr Davies said that as the churchyard was now the responsibility of the Parish Council he would contact the church architect about the condition of the wall surrounding the church.
Gaydon Green Fund
After discussion it was decided that double-sided signs should be placed 1) half-way down Kineton Road and 2) on Banbury Road past the crossing islands.
Budget
Councillors agreed an increase of £2149 in the precept for the coming year.
Next Meeting
The next meeting will be held on Tuesday 7 January 2025 at 7.30pm.
5th 9.30am Holy Communion Gaydon
10.00am Holy Communion Northend
12th 9.30am Morning Prayer Gaydon
10.00am Morning Prayer Northend
19th 9.30am Agapë Service Gaydon
10.00am Morning Prayer Northend
26th 9.30am Prayer and Praise Gaydon
10.00am Morning Prayer Northend
Wednesday 25th - Christmas Day
If you have something to celebrate or commemorate, ring Siobhan on 07780 689582, and she will raise the flag for you, in return for a £5 contribution to Church funds.
The Mobile Library will call at the Telephone Box at 2.25pm for half an hour on Friday 24th.
The Tai Chi group meets every Wednesday evening at 7 o'clock in the Village Hall. Please text 07514 011406 so that we can look out for you. After a month, please donate a coin for the hire of the Hall.
A Thank You to all the ladies, and gents, who attended our Breast Cancer Now Afternoon Tea at Willis House, Chadshunt, on 16 August. We raised £524.30 for a great cause supporting so many people.Anitra won the bottle of Prosecco for guessing the closest number of strawberries. It was lovely to bring so many neighbours together.
'Thank you' from Louise and Maddie Jelley
New Year Fun at the Museum Thursday 2nd - 6th Jaguar Breakfast Meet Saturday 4th Historic Rally Car Register Day Saturday 11th Information and tickets at www.britishmotormuseum.co.uk
Carers4Carers
Kineton Village Hall 10:30am to 12 noon. Come along to Kineton Village Hall and meet fellow local carers over refreshments for conversation and support. This month we'll hear from local Occupational Therapist, Suzi Kerrall-Vaughan, about how occupational therapy may help you and your loved one. Feel free to bring your loved ones along - they can join our Companionship Group while we meet. We look forward to welcoming you there!
For further details about our carer support group or help with transport arrangements, please contact Gillian on 07947 893504; or send an email to kcarers4carers@gmail.com; or explore our website www.carers4carersonthefosse.org.uk.
January is a bleak month of short days and damp cold. Our village, like others, has mud as a feature: you find yourself slithering on the footpaths of many Warwickshire fields. It clings tenaciously to ones boots. As yet a cleat that can shed this has not been invented, so even the most expensive wellies pick up large chunks.
I find that the evergreen plants that normally blend in are now noticeable in trees and hedges. In my own garden I have cultivated large Tangles of Mistletoe on three of my apple trees. Their berry crop is profuse this season and I'm hoping the Mistlethrushes will spread it around, as it is scarce now in Warwickshire.
I have read a great deal about this mythical plant, once cut with silver sickles by the Druids and sold in huge bundles at Tetbury Wells Market each year for Christmas decorations. If you save the berries you can try smearing the sticky contents plus pips into cracks in the bark; or cut slits in a semblance of beak-wiping from which could grow a new Parasitic shoot.
Ivy is another fascinating plant known as Hedera or Helix. It's a wonderful source of nectar for winter insects and even bees on mild days. Winter Moths, whose unwelcome attentions by their wingless females led to the sticky bands once placed on fruit trees, are often caught in the headlights on wild winter nights. Ivy will also change the shape of its leaves as it climbs and so is often mistaken for a separate species.
Holly or ilex is well-known and there are many different species. It is the foodplant of the small Holly Blue butterfly, often seen around Gaydon in the early spring and summer, but is poisonous to most animals - though the berries are a good source of food for thrushes and Redwings. If we have a cold spell, look out for Waxwings which feed on Rowan and cotoneaster berries.
I've seen a herd of Roe Deer around Chadshunt recently: a lovely sight with a magnificent six-point stag. The signs of Badger activity, which resemble a bit of random digging, are all along the verges of Watery Lane and will continue unless we have very low temperatures. Foxes are very numerous too, so be sure your hens are locked up. My best wishes for the New Year to all readers, Bernard Price
Wednesday 25th - Christmas Day
If you have something to celebrate or commemorate, ring Siobhan on 07780 689582, and she will raise the flag for you, in return for a £5 contribution to Church funds.
The Mobile Library will call at the Telephone Box at 2.25pm for half an hour on Friday 24th.
The Tai Chi group meets every Wednesday evening at 7 o'clock in the Village Hall. Please text 07514 011406 so that we can look out for you. After a month, please donate a coin for the hire of the Hall.
A Thank You to all the ladies, and gents, who attended our Breast Cancer Now Afternoon Tea at Willis House, Chadshunt, on 16 August. We raised £524.30 for a great cause supporting so many people.Anitra won the bottle of Prosecco for guessing the closest number of strawberries. It was lovely to bring so many neighbours together.
'Thank you' from Louise and Maddie Jelley
New Year Fun at the Museum Thursday 2nd - 6th
Jaguar Breakfast Meet Saturday 4th
Historic Rally Car Register Day Saturday 11th
Information and tickets at www.britishmotormuseum.co.uk
Carers4Carers
Kineton Village Hall 10:30am to 12 noon. Come along to Kineton Village Hall and meet fellow local carers over refreshments for conversation and support. This month we'll hear from local Occupational Therapist, Suzi Kerrall-Vaughan, about how occupational therapy may help you and your loved one. Feel free to bring your loved ones along - they can join our Companionship Group while we meet. We look forward to welcoming you there!
For further details about our carer support group or help with transport arrangements, please contact Gillian on 07947 893504; or send an email to kcarers4carers@gmail.com; or explore our website www.carers4carersonthefosse.org.uk.
The next meeting of the Village Hall Committee is to be held on Monday 13 January at 8pm in the Hall.
Gaydon allotmenteers would like to thank the kind, generous and anonymous person who donated garden tools for our use on the allotment. These will prove to be extremely useful in our continuing efforts to extract food and flowers from our plots! Thanks again!
The 2024 Over-65s Christmas lunch was a festive and particularly delicious event, it seemed to me. Wine and soft drinks flowed freely, of course! We are grateful as ever to our accomplished turkey-cooks and the providers of succulent vegetables. It's really quite an achievement to produce the perfect Christmas dinner when everything is spirited in, minutes before, from all parts of the village. Second-helpings complete, the decks were cleared. Then the magnificent St Marks Trifles appeared by magic and the traditional St Giles Mincepies were served with mints and coffee.
As ever, it was an opportunity to meet old friends and catch up with everyone's news; but the toast to 'Absent Friends' was heard, too. Sincere thanks to all who help to keep this village tradition alive. JR
The Editor would like to thank everyone who helps the production of our Parish News Magazine to continue in this digital age. We are grateful to our advertisers who pay for our printing ink; the Parish Council who fund the paper; and our business manager who keeps our accounts in order. Our contributors provide the content of the magazine, like BP's inimitable Nature Notes, keeping us all in touch with life in the village. However, our techie has kindly provided the QR Code above for quick and easy access to the Magazines on-line!
Over the Christmas period, I was talking to a cousin of mine who used to be a 'roadie' with the band UB40 and is someone with an interest in sound systems. When I told him about the details of the proposed development, he came up with an interesting image of the effect on Gaydon village which I thought - although ominous - was ingenious. He said it sounded as if it would be the equivalent of a row of giant Marshall amps/speakers turned up to 11(!?), over a quarter of a mile in length, broadcasting the sounds of up to 55 lorry-movements per hour (CEG (Malta) Ltd own figures) and the associated cacophony from its elevated site all over the village 24/7.
But not only that:
The elevated site would produce and project, not just sound, but a cascade of pollutants which would descend on to the village, including the notorious 'carbon black', a tasty mixture of rubber and hydrocarbon
particulates produced by vehicle tyres and exhaust systems. Many Gaydon residents were compensated by the Environment Agency in the 1990s following the opening of the M.40 because of the presence of these toxic residues on their properties. (Another reminder, by the way, should anyone accuse us of being NIMBYs over this develop-ment, that Gaydon has tolerated, stoically, and with little fuss, well above the UK average, extensive housing and commercial developments in its vicinity over the past 30 years.)
Early in December, Bernard Sellman who farms 275 acres of land to the south and west of Gaydon, invited me to see for myself how his farmland absorbs the run-off water as it leaves the (mainly Victorian) pipework and is directed away from the village. Mr Sellman is very knowledgeable (he has to be!) about drainage and run-off and the related ditches and culverts which helps prevent flooding in the village, at the moment. He showed me where there was a particularly fast-flow of water in a ditch that was basically the final run-off for the west of the village. However, the run-off rainwater to the east and north-east of the village does not escape the vicinity of the village so easily! Owing to an east-west aligned ridge between Gaydon and his land, rainwater from the natural elevation of the village (and the would-be development) is forced down the Banbury Road. As we know, along with the centre of the village, the Banbury Road properties were particularly badly affected by the 2007 floods. He also told me
about the sewage, settlement beds.
It seems that in the past two years, 2-3 tankers (per day, at the moment) collect the excess 'residue' from the sewage beds because of the dramatic increase in housing around the village. The tankers access the beds via an exceedingly rough track containing potholes - including one about 8-9 feet long, if deep enough, would be big enough to drown a horse! On at least one (admitted) occasion, a tanker, because of its weight and the uneven track, became grounded and stuck. You don't want to know about one of the options they were prepared to use, before they eventually freed it! Of course, the responsibility for the maintenance and improvement(!) of drainage and sewage-related matters lies with everyone's favourite, privatised, corporate company: Severn Trent.
Severn Trent is a company so good it feels as if we are honoured to pay them twice over: once to engorge their executives and shareholders; and twice for the actual maintenance and projected improvements to drainage, sewage and water supply. The prospect of the Gaydon development concreting over all those acres of elevated, water-retaining, farmland above the village is alarming.
More alarming is that the excessive run-off, drainage and sewage following the 'extreme weather events' we've been warned about will be largely the responsibility of Severn Trent; a company fined millions because of pollution-events and wholesale neglect of its responsibility for water control and removal. A timely, topical reference at this time of the year is that it would be the equivalent of trusting King Herod to run a children's nursery.
Finally, some residents are very surprised to hear that CEG (Malta) Ltd's planning application, after one year's notice, did not meet the 22nd November deadline, following which the planning scrutiny and contact has been taken out of the existing planning officer's hands (who has shepherded the process from the beginning) and is now the responsibility of the overall head of planning.
Someone remarked, using a football reference, that it seemed just like as if the Premier League had decided there were to be no more referees on the pitch and that all decisions about a match would be decided, more remotely, by VAR. Curious. Tony Hughes
The King’s Award for Voluntary Service 2024
Two charitable organisations in Warwickshire, Hope4Rugby and the Kineton Sports & Social Club, have officially been awarded The King’s Award for Voluntary Service 2024. This is the highest award a local voluntary group can receive in the UK and is equivalent to an MBE.
Warwickshire’s Lord Lieutenant presents National Honours
The extraordinary achievements of several residents in Warwickshire have been recognised in formal presentations and events by the Lord Lieutenant of Warwickshire, Tim Cox. Mrs Janet Nelson of Butlers Marston was presented with the BEM for services to education.
WCC’s guide to managing potholes: how you can help keep roads safe
Warwickshire County Council invites residents to join in the fight against potholes. Potholes form as a natural result of traffic, water and surface wear. Warwickshire County Council has created an efficient reporting system for residents to quickly notify the Council of potholes, track repair progress, and stay informed on ongoing maintenance.
Report a Pothole through the Council’s user-friendly online platform: warwickshire.gov.uk/potholes.
Log burners
Do you have a log burner in your home? Using wet wood, old furniture, or household waste can emit harmful fumes and toxic pollutants into your home when burnt. Switch to Ready to Burn wood as a safer alternative and have a carbon monoxide alarm fitted.
1980 3rd Carl Heath
2008 3rd Tony Irving
1978 7th Gerald Lush
1989 7th Lewis Watts
2022 12th Joan Morgan
1999 13th John Herrington
1985 20th Alfred Welch
2000 28th Agnes Bailey
If there is a special entry that you would like to see, let me know and I will try to make sure that the Book is open on that day. Julie Rickman
Peter Richard Mann
It is with sadness that we record the death of Peter Mann, aged 94, on 11 December 2024. The funeral service will be held at St Giles' Church, Gaydon, at 11am on Thursday 16 January followed by burial at Gaydon Cemetery. We offer our condolences to his family and friends.
Gill Malsbury
The family of Gill Malsbury would like to let her friends in Gaydon know that she passed away peacefully on 19 December after a brief illness. There will be a funeral service at Chesterton Church on Wednesday, 22 January. The family would very much welcome people to a gathering afterwards.
Please ring me, Geoff Cotterill, on 07710508436 for details.