Mill Lane / Church Lane · 8 May 2026
No room when a car meets a horse
Mill Lane and Church Lane are established routes for horse riders, walkers and cyclists. When a car meets a horse on these lanes, there is no room to pass at a safe distance. The driver must stop and wait, while the rider has little or no refuge beyond the verge or hedge.
The footage records exactly this type of encounter, at the entrance to Empshott Grange. Under the school proposal, this would become the single access point for all arriving traffic — every minibus, taxi and car turning in from the lane during concentrated drop-off and collection periods.
Horses are large, sensitive and sometimes unpredictable animals. Even a careful driver cannot control how a horse may react to a vehicle approaching too closely, stopping suddenly, engine noise, reversing traffic, or a build-up of vehicles behind it.
This risk is not theoretical. Several years ago, in the same local network of narrow lanes, a collision involving a van and a horse resulted in the horse suffering catastrophic injuries and being put down at the roadside. That incident illustrates the severity of the consequences when vehicles and horses are forced into conflict on lanes with no safe passing space.
Adding regular, time-pressured school traffic to lanes already shared by horse riders, walkers and cyclists would multiply these encounters. On lanes with no dedicated provision for vulnerable users, each meeting would rely on every driver slowing, stopping and judging the situation correctly. That is a serious and avoidable safety risk.