Kevin Pyne, of Lake Street, Dartmouth, writes:

I have known David Southwick for what seems like forever and I have always seen him as good man and a kind man who loves the river and the ways of the river.

And yet with regard to Lighthouse Beach, I feel he is very wrong as he is with the building of his great baronial hall on the side of a seemingly very unstable cliff face which will. as happened many years ago. in the same area be washed down in a storm and crumble into the sea.

Now I can't remember all the in and outs with the planners but I don't think permission was ever given for such a building which to me looks a little like, sorry David, 'Trago by the sea'.

However, where most see him as being wrong is in the fact that he has taken away a beach that we all of us who have lived here long enough can swear on oath that we have used since we were children, and this is where he is completely wrong and has forced the councils to go to law. And as Mrs. Thatcher once said, 'the law is not cheap'. In his excellently worded reply he then goes on to say about falling rocks.

And how I do wish we would as a nation stop hiding behind all this health and safety rubbish, meaning that if you choose to go to a beach and a rock hits you then it's your fault and just bad luck, likewise if you climb a ladder and fall off the wretched thing.

This high-vis and hard hat health and safety hell that we have made for ourselves will be the nation's entire demise.

I also know Edith Bull, she too is a friend and is a strong principled lady who believes in cutting right to the chase, so let battle commence.

However, I do hope it is not too long a battle because now that I am into my sixties I would like a paddle around in my Crocs one or two times more off Lighthouse Beach before my time is up, or fish with a prawn net there, because, you see, I know a lot of happy ghosts who played there or sunbathed there, or canoed or boated into that beach in other happier times.