SAVE COWBRIDGE CATTLE MARKET

Here we are preparing to set off

Every Tuesday big lorries loaded with bleating livestock descend on Cowbridge, destined to be bought and sold under the auctioneer's hammer.  The sales are quite a sight and visitors often go along to hear the incomprehensible babble so beloved of auctioneers the world over as your man in the Barbour jacket leans over a pen full of grey, recalcitrant sheep, occasionally poking at them with some species of stick and spouting his unique language.  Eventually the lorries and trailers that have been parked on the flat ground at the rear of the market come up again and the sheep, or what not, go off on return trips to new homes or, in some less fortunate cases, go off on single trips to the abattoir.  Welsh lamb being always at a premium

Of course, the market is not what it was.  Not since Foot and Mouth, not since the general decline in agriculture.  Nevertheless our market is one of only three in the whole of South Wales - the others being at Carmarthen and Abergavenney; and Abergavenney's market is under threat, we hear.

As indeed is ours!  That was why 'up to 1,000 people' - according to the television whose voice is always to be believed - led by the Mayor, the Town Crier, various elected notables and an ancient tractor - gathered yesterday to protest against plans by the Vale of Glamorgan Council to sell for housing and their own gain the land on which the market stands.

Now there has been a market in Cowbridge since medieval times.  When Richard de Clare, Lord of Glamorgan, in 1254 granted Cowbridge its first official Charter, he did so on the basis that this was a market town.  The clue is in the name after all, which is also reflected in our Welsh name 'Y Bont Faen,' which means 'The Cattle Bridge.'  In those medieval times the site now occupied by the Market, which lies just outside the town walls, was used for archery practice.  The roadway is still called 'The Butts'   The market moved here in 1954, seven hundred years later, (the yeomen archers having disappeared by then) and the land being in the ownership of the Cowbridge Rural District Council, the successors of the Council set up under Richard de Clare's Charter.

Sadly, twenty years later Cowbridge RDC became absorbed in a newly created Vale of Glamorgan Borough Council based in industrial Barry a dozen miles away, a town with which Cowbridge has always had an uneasy rural-urban relationship.  But the Vale Council, which of course is dominated by Barry with a dozen times the population of Cowbridge, now owns the land on which the yeomen of Cowbridge once practised their archery and on which generations of farmers have sold their livestock ever since; and the Vale is short of cash.  So it is proposing to sell the site for housing.

True, the Council has allocated land elsewhere in the Vale for a new market - but as no-one has money to build a new market, this isn't a real solution at all.  If the Cowbridge livestock market closes then the lorries full of animals will have to rattle away on a round trip of almost 100 miles to Carmarthen - which won't do the animals, or the environment, any good at all.

But beside these threats the town will suffer in a wider way if the cattle market site were to be sold off.  As you might imagine it is not easy to practise archery in small spaces.  So the cattle market site is actually quite large. This makes it easy on a market Tuesday to accommodate the lorries that bring the beasts here and then take them away again.  And as the market is usually finished by midday and only operates once a week, the market operators kindly make their acreage available to supplement Cowbridge's limited parking facilities by some 200 additional spaces.  All these would be lost if the market site were to be sold, making it even harder for shoppers and visitors to the town.

Moreover, our theatre is located at the furthest end of the Cattle market site.  (It is even called 'The Market Theatre'). The Council have generously told us that we can stay where we are - and so can the nearby Scout Hall - but of course they are proposing to take away our parking. Now many among our audiences are elderly and some are disabled. If we had no adjacent car parking we should not be viable any more.  Which sounds very much as though the Council wish to close us without obviously being seen to do so.  I imagine the same thing applies to the Scout Hall.

Here we are at the Cattle Market site.  Our Theatre stands on the far side of the cattle sheds

Next door to the Cattle Market site are the Town's playing fields.  These also the Vale Council has its eye on and calculating what they might be expected to fetch as building land.  They are not yet in any plan, but ask the simple question where people who bring their children to play rugby or cricket games on the playing fields leave their cars, and the answer is of course on the Cattle Market site and if this is sold and the parking lost then the utility of the playing fields is hit as well.  If they are no longer used, then, the Council will argue, why not sell them?  Already the Council have abandoned the upkeep of the public lavatories, formerly provided for those using the fields and attending the Cattle Market.

If only Cowbridge could run its own affairs again.  We have a lovely Town Hall and an oak panelled Council Chamber. In his ceremonial robes our Mayor looks like a medieval monarch.  We have aldermen in top hats that are the envy of any of our twin town visitors.  But this ancient council is powerless over anything more important than a park or a cemetery.  That they oppose to a man and woman selling the Cattle Market site is of no consequence.

So in case anyone reading this is moved by our plight, which could so easily one day be your plight too, could they please write to the Vale of Glamorgan Council and tell them to leave the Cowbridge's Cattle Market site alone.  Because you want to come and visit, don't you?  And if you do come and visit I am sure that you want to be able to park your car.  And perhaps visit Cowbridge's Theatre.  And, you never know, you might even have animals to sell, too.  Or, in the middle of the night when the cars and lorries have gone and the site is just the big and empty square that it ever was, you might be tempted to take up your longbow again and practice your archery.