A blonde-haired woman in the crowd finds her voice and fixes her gaze on Karl Hancock. “What you’ve shown is that you’re willing to break the law,” she says. “If you’re willing to break the law, what else are you willing to do?”
Applause breaks out.
Hancock, a second-generation farmer with a light tan and an easy manner, can only shake his head. As the accusations mount and a similar interjection follows, he puts a pleading, outstretched hand towards the 70-strong crowd.
“Can I just stop you there? Stop saying things that are not true.”
It’s Thursday evening at St Paul’s Church in Compstall, an old mill town, population around 500, tucked into a valley beside the River Etherow right on Stockport’s eastern edge. Outside, the silence is broken only by the occasional bleat of a grazing sheep or the rumble of a tractor. Inside, the mood is considerably less bucolic.
We were warned in advance that this meeting – the biggest of its kind for the village – may well descend into anarchy. So divisive is the issue at hand, so inflammatory, that almost every local who spoke to me did so only under condition of total anonymity. “Before I send you any further information, I would like it in writing from you that you and Manchester Mill… will keep our details completely anonymous,” one resident wrote to me this week. “We are fearful of the repercussions to our families when this hits the press.”
And what, exactly, has brought this corner of Greater Manchester to the brink of civil war? Music festivals, of course.
‘It’s like living in Nazi Germany’
It was an event last month that sparked the furore at St Paul’s Church, but this conflict is over a decade old. At the eye of the storm is Whitebottom Farm.
Hey! Lucy McLaughlin here, the writer of today's piece.
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