Horse Hill on the Move

Over the past year it has become increasingly evident to the most casual observer that something was seriously amiss on Horse Hill. In recent years the parish church of St. Joseph showed evidence of shifting foundations as widening cracks appeared in the walls. The rate of deterioration accelerated this past year to the point that the building was deemed to be unsafe and engineers were called in to determine whether remedial action was feasible or if the building would have to be demolished. The church is now closed.


More alarmingly, it became obvious that the major artery to Bathsheba and Cattlewash was slipping. Subsidence and lateral movement opened up significant cracks in the road surface while houses to the east of the church developed major cracks in the walls and stairways separated from buildings indicating a major and accelerating slippage of a large area of land.
In recent weeks the cracks and level variations have been addressed by resurfacing the road but within days the road surface has once again been distorted by what is evidently a major instability problem.


This is not the only area of the Scotland District that is affected by disruptive land slippage but it is probably the most serious for the people that live in this area and the businesses that rely on good road communications.

This situation is reminiscent of the phenomenal deterioration of the highway that transited Bath Plantation and the great quantity of work that had to be done to stabilize the land and repair the road in the 1990’s. Decades of neglect magnified the problem and added to the cost of remediation.


Learning from this experience, and realizing that the soil conservation unit needed a new remit and additional resources a major study was undertaken to address the preservation and development of the land stretching from Pico Tenerife in the north to Conset Bay in the south. The study involved local and international experts and resulted in the development of a a comprehensive long term strategic development plan for the area that addressed land management and diversified economic development.


The result was the establishment of the Scotland District Authority in 2007 to implement a detailed and complex strategic plan that involved government and private land owners. In the first instance, funding for the first 5 year period was established at 40 million dollars.
When the present government came to office they defunded the Authority. Since then their actions have been relegated to fire fighting one calamity after another as roads slip away and bridges collapse. One seventh of the land mass of Barbados has been virtually ignored and we have regressed instead of moving forward with developing economic activities and carrying out critical land stabilization programmes.


As usual the actions of government are a patchwork quilt of responses shaped after the fact by external events rather than part of a strategic process that seeks to shape our own development goals. One can only hope that the neglect in the area of Horse Hill will not lead to a catastrophic failure of the road system and the destruction of homes that would make the Joe’s River debacle look like a Sunday school picnic.

phillip.goddard@braggadax.com