I love the countryside. I find being in large open spaces nourishing. I can't think of anything more beautiful and uplifting. I think one the greatest tragedies of the modern age is the fact that slowly green spaces are vanishing and my biggest gripe are the loss of hedgerows and even hedges in urban environments.

However - unless it really does contravene some legal issue and with all due respect to the OP - I think this really is dressed-up NIMBYism. The sentence "I support the idea in principle but it is totally the wrong place for it", is pretty damning as far as I am concerned.

Last year I read an article about another 'planning' issue that puts this particular thread in another context. My area - as important to me as the OP's area is to them - is having planning problems too. There's a lot of development in Manchester and its satellite areas these days. The Ancoats area is beginning to look like something out of a science-fiction film. My town outside of Manchester is going the same way with a lot of new accommodation appearing.

Some of it is in the form of conversions, where old mills are being given a new lease of life as they are converted into a massive shelving systems for little shoeboxs that get called 'apartments'. Other developments are completely new builds. Very often, buildings with hundreds of years of history are demolished to make way for these new developments and there's very little anyone can do about it unless it's 'listed'. The town I now live in and the town I grew-up in were once hubs in international industry and trade. Unless you read a book on the subject you'd never know as there's less evidence of it every year. Not only do we have no green spaces, but 'they' take away the only other thing we had to make up for it: our history.

Sadly, and to 'rub it in' further, often the 'regeneration' is actually 'gentrification'. These new builds have price tags beyond the reach of the previous population. 'Renewal' is often as much a case of removing the previous demographic as it is putting down new bricks and mortal. Those people now need somewhere else to go. It's not just the rural population that get displaced because of yuppies moving into their area.

The point of all this is that the article I read was about the actual design of these new housing developments and projections for housing developments in the future. I can't remember the actual figure but it was something like 15%-20% of people living in places that undergo some 'urban renewal' or 'regeneration' between the years 2000 and 2025 will be no longer be living in ground level accommodation. Everyone else will either being living on the ground floor of new builds or living in older accomodation. To me, that's shocking.

It's one thing to talk about building in the countryside, but it's another when some people in other areas can't even live on the ground! Whilst the loss of countryside is undeniably tragic (the loss of the flora and fauna is more tragic, to me, than the loss of 'picturesque scenery' though), what I'm describing in the rest of this post is both the reality and the alternative to people encroaching into 'green areas'. It's hard to wholly sympathise with developers building between two existing villages when people in urban areas are now having to live with people directly above them, below them, to the side of them &c and who can look out of their window and just see whole areas of people living in exactly the same way: in ugly grey boxes on top of each other.

The fact of the matter is that populations are increasing generally, and urban areas in particular are seeing a lot of immigration which exacerbates already existing problems. People need places to live and - again, whilst encroachment into the green is tragic - what's the alternative? Just keep stacking people up higher and higher like some kind of warehouse? A lot of urban areas are so short of greenfield and brownfield sites that this is the only way of creating new housing.