大象传媒

This week John Craven will be visiting the Wye Valley, an area of outstanding natural beauty spanning three counties. He is going back in time to take a look at how the 12th Century monks of Tintern Abbey once lived and worked this landscape. 听John will also be learning all about their relationship with agriculture, living off the land and their penchant for a rather unusual but increasingly more common tipple.

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The Wye Valley is famed for being home to the birth of tourism and the picturesque movement. This week however it鈥檚 a rather more thrill-seeking pursuit that鈥檚 on the cards as Ellie Harrison will be getting harnessed up and ready for a right rocky adventure! On the banks of the River Wye sits the village of Symonds Yat, home to a whopping eight hundred challenging climbing routes. With the help of expert climber Sven Hassall, Ellie Harrison will be taking on a feat that only 1% of climbers have ever achieved!

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With the huge changes and challenges the milk industry has seen over the past few years, this week Adam Henson visits two very different types of dairy farms in Gloucestershire to see how they are coping. On the first farm, a young third generation farmer shows Adam how he uses very traditional methods to produce his milk. Adam then takes the young farmer to another farm to show him how they use modern methods to produce their milk.

Fracking is back in the news, but is this controversial way of extracting shale gas from under the UK ever going to become a reality here? Tom Heap looks at the driving forces behind the so-called 鈥榙ash for gas鈥�, including the financial benefits and the need for the energy it could provide. He also hears some of the concerns about the environmental impact of taking yet more fossil fuel out of the ground. 听听

In the USA landowners have been making considerable profits from the sale of shale gas found and extracted from their land. But the laws on who has those rights are very different in the United Kingdom. Ownership of oil and gas within the land area of Great Britain is vested in the Crown - this basically means it is owned and administered by the British Government. This should not be confused with the 鈥淐rown Estate鈥�, which pays its profit to the government and whilst it manages one of the nation鈥檚 largest rural estates, this does not include the rights to hydrocarbons such as shale gas. The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills then grants licences to explore for and exploit all oil and gas resources. The private companies that buy these licences can then take the profits from the sale of these resources. These profits can also result in sizeable amounts of tax revenue going to the British Government. And the landowner? They can only make money from shale gas by leasing the land where the drilling, fracking or extraction is taking place.