I write in response to the letter from Mr Bott, clerk to Selworthy and Without Parish Council regarding the National Trust’s plan for the coastguard station at Hurlstone Point (Free Press August 30).

I am a student at the University of Bath and I come home every weekend. On arrival, I always head for Hurlstone. The most profound moments of my life have happened there.

Under dawn’s fractured light, harbour porpoises surface like spirits from Tolkien’s dreams. The air so still and silent I hear their breath.

Gannets hang overhead, painting the headland with charcoaled wingtips.

Then a flash of slate-grey. I sit transfixed. His eye locks on mine and all I see is wild. The peregrine flies so fast his wings sound like shredding paper. 

To be here alone; to experience true silence; to step inside the coastguard station and imagine the lives which existed here before - that is to glimpse a world now far removed from most of us.

The proposed development will bleach this wildness, after which all the singing voices of this site will become slightly dimmer until they are forever lost in the growing cloud of human noise.

I strongly support the views of the Exmoor Society and the Exmoor Natural History Society over planning application 6/29/19/108.

Jen Miles, Redway, Porlock.