Roughlee Parish Council
James Starkie, replacement wall, speeding, panto...
I am sad to report the passing of James Keith Starkie during September. Our thoughts and prayers go to Janet and her family. Over the last 20 plus years James had a huge influence on our village. During this time he had been Chair of the Village Centre Committee and the Parish Council, he was was instrumental in designing and project managing the porch on the village centre and for commissioning “our Alice” (as he would say) statue in the village, amongst many other things. He also went on to successfully represent us as a Borough Councillor and then later on as Mayor of Pendle. During my last tenure as Chair of the PC I had quite a few differences of opinion with James due to his passionate nature, but none lasted any time at all and things got back to normal very quickly afterwards. A true character with nothing but Roughlee and Pendle at his heart.
As you read this I am hoping that the wall near to the school has been finally completed, that the road is fully open and our bus service is running again. I am glad that they weren’t building Hadrian’s Wall.
During our annual Parish meeting in July, some residents asked about trying to implement a 20mph zone throughout the village. We have done some preliminary research on this, which proved in a lot of instances to be very divisive and then you get to the crux of the matter “how to enforce it”. As a result we decided at our last PC meeting to put this on hold for the time being. However, all is not lost. Once the road is fully open and things have got back to normal, we will be taking up our local PCSO’s offer to have some unannounced random speed checks at appropriate times of the day throughout the village. So you have been warned, please let’s not have the statistics show that it is our residents causing the problems and not our visitors as we think.
We have no news re the BKV competition. The results are due to announced at an official presentation on 16th October – this event we will be attending, so fingers crossed.
Finally, Pantomime rehearsals have picked up a pace and the cast and organisers are having lots of fun and are working very hard to make this a successful production in January. Keep an eye out for the dates and publicity relating to this.