A resident contacted me recently to let me know that a couple of drain covers had gone missing on land near the pit pond at Blackhall Rocks.
Yesterday morning I got in touch with the county council’s countryside team who located the exposed holes, made them safe and then passed this query to the Wildlife Trust as the agency responsible for the land.
I’ve reproduced countryside team’s update below in full. Until everything is made fully safe please take extra care when at this location - or even better, avoid it altogether:
Just to give you an update on the manhole cover situation at Blackhall. After you sent the map, the Assistant Ranger on site found one of the holes and covered it with orange mesh and pins for the time being. He did inform me however that it is a considerable way down the steep bank side into Blue House Gill, so shouldn’t pose much risk to the public.
The site ranger was going to have a look over today to see if he could locate the other one. We will have to pass this onto the Wildlife Trust, as DCC only manage to the top of the Gill and beyond that it is their land/lease. It’ll probably need passing to NWL as well, as these must be something to do with the station at the top which they monitor, so we will either do that or ask DWT to do it to try and resolve the situation asap.