'Jarring' column approved for World Heritage Site

A council has granted planning permission for a "jarring" pole roughly the height of a double-decker bus to be erected at a World Heritage Site.

The National Trust wants to replace two pay-and-display parking machines with solar-powered terminals in the car park of the Avebury stone circle in Wiltshire.

It applied for permission for a four metre (13ft) tall column with a satellite link and solar panel to connect the terminals, which Wiltshire Council has approved.

"The location of the column within the car park at Avebury has been carefully considered to reduce its prominence for visitors," a National Trust spokesperson said.

The column is a communications tower which will help visitors make payments on their phone in an area notorious for weak mobile signal, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.

The Avebury Society, a civic and heritage group that works to protect the Avebury World Heritage Site, opposed the application.

They said they were "concerned that, although the proposal may be out of the direct line of sight of people in Avebury's stone circle, it is well within the setting of the monument and will in particular have an impact on people's perceptions of it".

"For visitors coming to Avebury to see a Neolithic monument, their first sight will be of modern electronic equipment, which will be incongruous and jarring," the society added.

Wiltshire Council planners said it acknowledged that the tower "would be discernible from certain viewpoints", but added it "would not result in the loss of landscape features, significant alteration to landscape character, or interruption of key landscape views".

A National Trust spokesperson said the column will have a "slim profile and matt brown finish" to ensure it blends in with trees in the area.

"The site of the column is not in a direct line of sight from the prehistoric monuments of the World Heritage Site," a spokesperson added.

Planning permission was granted subject to archaeological surveys being conducted before work commences.

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