Regulation

A Planning Inspectorate inquiry into a 49MW solar farm less than a mile from Sandwich runs through this Friday, with Richborough Roman Fort at the centre of the fight

Dover District Council's planning committee unanimously rejected Statkraft's 206-acre Little South Solar Farm on Ash Level in November 2025 over harm to the neighbouring Richborough Roman Fort and Amphitheatre. Statkraft appealed, and the Planning Inspectorate's public inquiry, running until Friday 25 September, is now weighing whether that rejection stands.

21 September 2026 · Source: KentOnline

This is the closest a story on this site has come to Sandwich itself. Ash Level sits north of the A257 between Ash and Sandwich, less than a mile from the town, and the 206-acre scheme Statkraft wants to build there would sit close enough to Richborough Roman Fort and Amphitheatre, the site of the first Roman landing in Britain in AD 43, that Historic England and Kent County Council's own archaeologists argued the harm to the setting outweighs the developer's case. Dover District Council's committee agreed unanimously in November 2025, rejecting the application 10-0 against more than 650 objections. Statkraft's appeal to the Planning Inspectorate is now testing whether a district council's reading of heritage harm survives contact with a formal inquiry, and the hearing itself runs through this Friday.

The Save Ash Level campaign's core argument, that brownfield sites, industrial land, rooftops and car parks should be assessed before farmland next to a scheduled monument, is the same rooftop-first logic this site's own coverage of the 60GW untapped commercial-roof report made from the opposite direction: there is a lot of unused roof in the UK, and every acre of greenfield solar approved without exhausting that option first hands ammunition to exactly the objectors making that case at Ash Level. Lord Mackinlay's line at the inquiry, that nobody would ring Dover Castle with panels, is rhetorical, but the underlying tension it names, between hitting a national deployment target and protecting a specific irreplaceable site, is not going away as the pipeline of utility-scale schemes through East Kent keeps growing (this site has covered Elvington, South Brooks and Romney Marsh in the same few weeks).

Whatever the inspector decides, it changes nothing for a Sandwich homeowner's own MCS installation or SEG export rate; this is a 49MW greenfield scheme, not a rooftop one, and the grid connection it would draw on sits in a different queue to a domestic G98 application. What it does mark is how contested the local planning environment around Sandwich has become for solar at scale, right as national policy keeps leaning harder on renewable deployment. A decision is expected in the weeks after the inquiry closes; worth a follow-up once it lands, given how directly it will shape the tone of the next utility-scale application anywhere near this stretch of the Kent coast.

Read the original: KentOnline. Commentary is Sandwich Solar's own editorial view; the original reporting is credited to its publisher.

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