Controversial ‘manège’ in Herefordshire allowed

A former airline pilot and international riding competitor has won a lengthy battle to allow a controversial “manège” or riding area at her home in the Herefordshire countryside.

Sally Toye’s application, originally made in November 2021, to permit the partly-built 35×18-metre facility within a designated local wildlife site near the village of Pipe Aston in the Mortimer Forest, was unanimously rejected by councillors a year later due to its ecological and landscape impact.

She had made and then withdrawn a similar application in late 2020, though work at the site appears to have begun even earlier.

A petition opposing the scheme was signed by over 800 people, its initiator Christina O’Neill accusing Ms Toye at the planning meeting of “appalling ecological vandalism” at the site.

Ms Toye had said local opposition to her plans had been “disproportionate”. She then appealed against the council’s refusal to the government’s Planning Inspectorate.

Planning inspector Tamsin Law has now sided with Ms Toye and has overturned the council’s decision, so allowing the manège to stay.

Despite its “elevated position” in the forest clearing, views of the manège from nearby roads and rights of way were “limited”, and it would anyway “be in keeping with the wider character and appearance of the area”, she said.

And with bird, bat and hedgehog boxes, insect hotels and wildflower areas among the biodiversity measures with the proposal, it “would also provide ecological enhancement that would benefit the local wildlife site”, Ms Law added.

She also dismissed concerns about increased flooding from the new surface.