National Trust of Guernsey visit land areas at Mont Cuet and Creve Coeur

For the best part of the last two decades, an area of National Trust of Guernsey land at Mont Cuet and Creve Coeur has been leased to the States of Guernsey to facilitate landfill operations. Creve Coeur has now been fully utilised and, with the exception of a gas flare stack and several biogas monitors, largely returned to a green area.  Neighbouring Mont Cuet, the Island’s current landfill site, is expected to reach capacity by about 2018, after which it will undergo a similar process to return it to a green state, albeit biogas-monitoring equipment will remain in place for about thirty years thereafter. As part of an unusual and highly interesting visit to the site, two Council Members and Trust Co-ordinator Jemma Charlotte Field met Joe Adams, Site Manager, Creve Coeur and Sarah Robinson, Senior Manager, Guernsey Waste.  Just 200 metres away from Mont Cuet, we stayed on site at Creve Coeur for well over an hour watching, with unabashed fascination, the incessant process of caterpillar type machinery compacting our household waste in the presence of an ever- attentive cloud of many thousand, voracious gulls. A trip to Mont Cuet is a real eye-opener to a subject from which we tend to shy away.  The comfortable feeling of ‘job done’, once we’ve put our black rubbish bags out is probably familiar to us all, yet our five-minute, weekly household task is only the beginning of a multi-decade process of degradation that will take longer than our lifetimes to complete. A trip to the tip is a visceral experience which helps in appreciating the present fate of what we leave out for waste collection. Mont Cuet, Creve Coeur and La Jaonneuse are familiar territory for the National of Guernsey as the Trust has, by arrangement with the Guiton Group, recently taken on the guardianship of former explosives store No.79 at La Jaonneuse Baie.  At some stage in the future, the Trust will have access to an extensive stretch of land, enjoying an outstanding panoramic view, at this most northern point of the Island. The site visit offered a remarkable and enjoyable insight into an often unseen activity. Our thanks go to Sarah and Joe for sharing their time and knowledge of this fascinating aspect of Island life. If NTG Members are interested in joining a small group visit to Creve Coeur, please contact our Trust Co-ordinator, Jemma Charlotte Field: [email protected]