Parish Plan

Castle Bytham Parish Plan

A vision for preserving the best while developing to meet the needs of the community of the future.

Download the Parish Plan >>>  Castle Bytham Parish Plan (PDF 10.9 MB)

Parish Plan Update (added : 13/03/11 : MG)

From the Glenside News (February 2011) …

We hope by now that all villagers / parishioners have received their free copy of the Parish Plan, but if, for some reason, you have not yet got yours, then please do let us know and we will dispatch one immediately.

By way of a quick update, work on this Plan started in May 2008 and since then a small group of volunteers has spent many hundreds of hours researching, reading, carrying out surveys, talking to villagers and finally writing up the Plan and producing this final copy. This is the first time anyone has done anything like this for Castle Bytham and we are very proud to have been a part of it.

The Parish Plan represents a point in time where people in the village were asked what they thought about the village  – what made it good, what they did not like and what we need to do for the future. We think we have got a good balance of how the village feels.

However, there are a couple of points we would like to make to put things in perspective. At one stage, we had more than 100 pages of text (including photographs and tables) and as an editorial group, we felt this was too much to put into the Plan. We therefore made a conscious decision to reduce the amount of copy to what we felt was a reasonable level. in doing so we had to edit out aspects of the history of the village to focus on the present and more importantly the future.

We also made a clear decision that the Plan should be made available to all households in a hard copy format as we realised that not everyone would have access to electronic copies. That said, we do have copies of the Parish Plan on CD-Rom and it will also be uploaded onto the Castle Bytham website, along with a number of background documents/appendices. Fuller details of accessing these are in the main part of the Plan.

We have already received many comments about the Plan, most of which are very congratulatory and appreciative of all the hard work that has been put in and how professional it looks.

However, we have also had some concerns raised in that we did not include a map of the whole village, and as such, some villagers might have felt that we were not being fully inclusive. Others have thought the Plan was only about the Conservation Area.

For the avoidance of doubt, the Plan is about the whole village of which the Conservation Area is only a part. We also think that the omission of a map of the full village and its surrounding environs is a fair point. While it is now too late to include in the hard copy, we are looking at ways in which a full map of the village can be made available and we are hoping that this can be uploaded to the Castle Bytham website in the very near future.

Finally we hope you enjoy reading the Parish Plan and seeing for yourself just what a great place Castle Bytham is to live.

Patrick Chandler
Chairman, on behalf of The Parish Plan Working Group
01780 410435

Added : 13/03/11 : MG