FALMOUTH Rugby Club faces financial uncertainty after plans to build housing on greenfield land it owns fell through last week.

While I feel sorry for the rugby club, and would be sad to see such a great Falmouth institution fail, this is surely a clear cut case of caveat emptor - or buyer beware.

Perhaps before endangering hundreds of thousands of pounds of members money - and risking the future of the club - the management should have taken time to consider the problems any such plans might face.

The rugby club is currently in a trap of its own making, and would surely have been better off consulting the public at the very start of this sorry saga, rather than dishing out tonnes of cash on what is little more than tonnes of empty earth.

If it had foreseen public opposition to removing the club from the heart of the community it claims to support and transplanting it to Bickland Water Road, this whole mess may have been avoided.

While I am loath to see the club fold, and we are far from that, planners have no reason to take its poor financial choices into consideration when ruling on the loss of good agricultural land and the erosion of the buffer between Bickland and Budock.

One final note to the keyboard warriors: Menehay was not knocked off Cornwall’s Allocations DPD for a 300 home greenfield site near Vospers, but for high density housing on brownfield land at Vospers.