ONCE upon a time there was a little old airfield.

It was quite a cute little old airfield – historically important, too – if a bit dilapidated.

Around it were fields full of free-range pigs, happily foraging in the manner that nature intended.

Then along came an inspector from the government who said it would be all right to build some houses around that airfield to help meet the cost of running it.

Many folk thought that was fair enough and a few houses should do the trick.

But the inspector didn’t actually say how many houses.

“Oh goody,” said the local landowners. “We can see pound signs.”

Then along came a firm of big city architects who drew some beautifully-coloured maps which showed how they could fit 470 homes round the airfield and still have room for some aeroplanes, as long as they didn’t make too much noise.

And these big city architects were afraid that mucky pigs would spoil the artistic effect of their designs.

Perhaps they’d prefer it if all our farm animals with their smells and their muddy feet could be shoved out of sight in factory-size sheds, never to see the light of day, and only emerge on a conveyor belt, conveniently chopped up and shrink-wrapped for the supermarket?

So they said they’d talk to Wiltshire Council, who own the farmland, and see if they could do something (unspecified) to make sure the pigs didn’t put off buyers.

Now there were quite a lot of people already living near the little old airfield who weren’t very happy about all this.

They worried that it might not remain an active airfield for very much longer.

They thought it was supposed to be a conservation area, not a strategic development site.

They liked the green space, the animals and the birds.

They said hundreds of new houses had already sprung up all over their area.

The ones who lived in Ford thought their village would be ruined.

They all agreed that nobody had asked them about it in the first place, or taken proper notice of their opinions.

The council said that anyone who wanted to complain had until July 30 (planning application number 15/04004/OUT).

“Goodness,” protested the protesters. “That’s not very long to wade through hundreds of pages of professionally-produced documents.”

So will this tale have a happy ending?

We won’t know until the autumn.

In the meantime, I’m sorry if I’ve bored you by banging on about housing twice in a fortnight.

But I share the objectors’ concern that such a massive development will kill the thing it claims to love.

anneriddle36@gmail.com