We won in September. Now we need you to write.

When you signed in August, a 50-pitch campsite was about to open beside a listed farmhouse in a conservation area, and nobody could stop it. Thank you. Here is what has happened since.

The campsite ran for the full 60 days, 15 August to 13 October. Two fires on the grass in the week of the national wildfire alert. Portable toilets 9 metres from a neighbour’s back door. Tents left collapsed on the field for weeks. Litter on the grass a week after the last tent went. The roe deer that used the field every afternoon stopped coming. Nobody was required to assess any of it.

On 30 September the Lake District National Park Authority voted 15 to 1 to make an Article 4 Direction covering the whole National Park. From March 2028, a temporary campsite will need planning permission like everything else. That is exactly what we asked for.

But it is not final. The Authority is consulting until Monday 16 November, and will decide on 16 December whether to confirm it. A petition against it has been started, and it claims the Direction is a ban. It is not. Campsites can still open with permission. Well-run sites in sensible places will get it. What ends is the field next to a home, a listed building or a lake shore opening with no questions asked.

This matters most for wildlife. At Nibthwaite, campers and dogs are in the water where otters feed. At Overwater, the lapwing that nested on the shore for years have gone since the field beside it became a campsite. In Bowness, no one was required to look at the bat roosts in the lime trees or the deer route across the field, so no one did. A planning application comes with an ecological survey. That survey is the only thing that stands between a field and the animals that live there, and right now nobody is required to do one.

Please do one thing before 16 November: email planning@lakedistrict.gov.uk with “Article 4 Direction 7/2026/ART43” in the subject line and say, in your own words, that you support the Direction being confirmed as made, covering the whole Park. Two or three sentences are enough. Say why it matters to you.

This is our National Park. People come here for the fells, the lakes, the wildlife and the quiet. If we let those be worn away, field by field, with no one allowed to ask a single question, there will be nothing left worth coming for. Individual emails count for far more than signatures. Please write, and ask your friends, family and neighbours too.