News that a plan for a "Dales-style" village on land between Crossflatts and Micklethwaite has been revived will have alarmed locals.

It is more than five years since the scheme was first mooted to a welter of protest. Residents presented a 1,000-signature petition opposing the idea and the plan was turned down by planners on access grounds. It was decided that the site was suitable only for limited housing.

However, the victory was not absolute. The application was left in abeyance. Now the proposal is being pursued once again and a planning advisor for the architects and town-planners involved has said that the access issue is considered to be resolvable.

That, surely, remains arguable. Nothing about the site has changed in the last five years. The roads through and around Micklethwaite are narrow and tortuously winding. It is hard to see how they could take much more traffic. Yet the number of vehicles using them is bound to increase alarmingly as motorists from the new "village" use them to head for Ilkley and the North.

Besides, Micklethwaite has a special character all its own, enjoyed both by those who live there and others who visit the village. It would be damaged by such a huge development nearby.

The planners' verdict five years ago surely was the right one. There might be the possibility of a small amount of new housing near the main road, but a massive development on this 43-acre site would be vastly out of scale.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.