Adam Thomas – Brockholes’ Disaster Zone

Local resident ‘Rodger M’ posted this review on the Brockhole website:
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“11 minute overstay based on actual entrance and departure caught on camera.  Cost £90.  Big brother parking with no mercy makes this a place I will never visit again.  Very unfriendly, money making and spiteful”

In reply the Brockhole manager, Adam Thomas, recommended that an appeal be lodged through parking@lakedistrict.gov.uk and said “if you have paid the fine and we find that you should not have been fined then we will ask Parking Eye to refund you”. 

It’s difficult to think of a more disingenuous statement.  Adam Thomas wanted to give the impression that he could get the fine revoked.  He can’t. ​“Parking Eye” is an independent company to whom the National Park Authority have given the contract to manage the car park at Brockhole.  They apply the rules strictly and Thomas has no influence over their decisions.

Brockhole has received a barrage of complaints because of their evil parking policy, but this is nothing compared with the row over the decision to fell the Monkey Puzzle tree, about which Adam Thomas has shown that dis-ingenuousness is second nature to him.  In an article in the Westmorland Gazette on 11th October he said that the tree “is much loved, including by me”.  As he has spent much of the past year trying to destroy the tree his statement that he loves it can only be true in the Wildean sense that “each man kills the thing he loves”.  In the same article he promised that if the tree were to be felled a cutting would be taken, so that there would be a clone of the tree, which would be planted somewhere else in the garden.  The other day I went to Brockhole and asked to see the cutting, so that I could be reassured that it was in good health.  To my astonishment, I was told that no such cutting existed, and that there were no plans to take one. The tree, the lovely, healthy, historic tree, was felled today.  What was in Adam Thomas’s mind when he made his promise?  Did he mean it at the time, but never got round to doing anything?  Or was it a cynical ploy to buy off his critics?  Everyone will make up their own mind and I’m sorry to say that the answers I’ve received haven’t been at all kind to him.  “Rodger M” said that he’ll never visit Brockhole again.  As long as Adam Thomas is in charge there will be many, many more with the same view.
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In the Westmorland Gazette, Alan Tunningly, their news editor writes; “I believe that to push ahead with the felling was an act of ecological and cultural vandalism…In my view, the national park leadership should hang their collective heads in shame.”