Traveller family will be moved to new site

...near tip, cemetery and sewage works

- By EDDIE BISKNELL

A HOMELESS Traveller family will be temporarily accommodated on a depot next to a Derbyshire cemetery despite concerns over potential disruption to grieving families.

At a Derbyshire Dales District Council meeting, members approved plans to move the family currently staying on the authority's Clifton Road car park site in Ashbourne to its own Watery Lane depot.

This would see the family, to which the council has had a legal obligation to permanently accommodate for more than a decade, directed to a plot opposite a tip and neighbouring a cemetery, allotments and close to sewage works.

The meeting was told Derbyshire County Council continued under new leadership not to support the release of land approved for Traveller pitches in Watery Lane (in 2015), due to the potential future bypass.

However, an email from county council chairman Nick Adams, who represents Dovedale and Ashbourne North, said the use of a derelict part of the opposite tip would be supported as a temporary measure.

The family had stayed there for a year from November 2024 until November 2025.

Graham Elliott, member of the Ashbourne Allotment Association, said the group opposed the depot plans, saying it appeared to be a "desperate attempt to provide a site at any cost". He claimed the authority was "behaving like a dictatorship", with reputational and legal consequences.

The council continues to retain earmarked plans to turn sites at Matlock Bath railway station and on a field next to cemetery in Middleton-by-Wirksworth, into temporary sites.