Allow me to correct an unfortunate editing error which totally distorted the meaning of the (perhaps overlong) letter from me last week regarding Barnet Council’s Burtonhole Farm.

Its fifth paragraph in full, including the two words ‘for years’, previously omitted by myself, should have read: “This information is given in a 1996 council report of a ‘public’ inquiry into a hapless clay-pigeon shoot club illegally, but within wide-ranging earshot, hosted there for years by the council’s tenant – until the council summarily evicted the club, not the tenant – while the general public, contrary to the council’s brief, were rigorously excluded.”

Another such error, in that letter’s second paragraph, suggested that the outlined (not described in every juicy detail) 'scandalous situation' has been going on “for more than a decade”. Truly, it has been going on for the best part of two decades.

Finally, I apologise for myself misquoting the estimated cost – which in 1996 was £4.2million, not just ‘£4million’ – of the council’s promised, but in the end aborted, public access restoration work. To relieve us hard-pressed and, until now, grievously misled council taxpayers, might or indeed should not the council now, if went ahead with the first of my two-proposed options of ‘keeping its promise to the public at long last’, recoup at least a tiny fraction of that necessary but avoidable expense from its own multi-culpable tenant, not to unkindly mention some of its councillors and its own administrators?

Walter Grey
Arden Road
Finchley