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Open Country

Factual: Science & Nature: Nature & Environment

Countryside magazine featuring the people and wildlife that shape the landscape of Britain

Countryside magazine featuring the people and wildlife that shape the landscape of the British Isles

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Open Country: Gainsborough's Nodding Donkeys

07/04/2016

Gainsborough's Nodding Donkeys

BBC Radio 4 - Open Country, Gainsborough's Nodding Donkeys

Helen Mark visits the nodding donkeys of the Gainsborough Trough.

Helen Mark discovers why the landscape in and around Gainsborough is peppered with nodding donkeys.

Forget Texas! There's oil in the plains of Lincolnshire. But not many people seem to notice.

Helen Mark travels to the market town of Gainsborough to discover more about the nodding donkeys that pepper its landscape. Oil wells sit comfortably fringed by a housing estate, the leisure centre and the golf course.

It turns out that the East Midlands is the UK's second largest inshore oil producing area, courtesy of the Gainsborough Trough, once a deep and dirty patch of sea. Now it produces twelve hundred barrels of high quality oil a day, mostly pumped up by nodding donkeys.

Whereas fracking attracts protest and controversy, local people seem quite content to live alongside these nodding pumps, perhaps because they look so benign - friendly even - and work away quietly with apparently little human intervention.

Helen meets local teacher and long-distance runner Nigel Bowler, for whom the donkeys are a landmark on his running routes. There's artist Verity Barrett, who loved the pumps as a child, part of the 'scenic route' on trips to visit her granddad.

Julie Barlow from i-gas explains the business of oil extraction and geologists Malcom Fry and Paul Hildreth slice through the soil to bring alive the geological layers that led to the Gainsborough Trough. Then there are Daniel Ashman and Louise Hammond, who've spent the last week camping outside a new exploratory oil boring site near the village of Laughton, as part of an anti-fracking protest.

As the dustbin lorry and the postman do their rounds of the Park Springs Housing Estate on the edge of Gainsborough, another few barrels of oil are drawn up from 1500m underground. The nodding donkeys aren't bad neighbours, it seems. 'I think they're wonderful' says Paul Hildreth.

Producer...Mary Ward-Lowery.

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