FIELDS at a farm run by a family-owned skip hire firm charged with serious environmental breaches were filled with mounds of household and construction waste, a court heard today (Friday, September 13).

A large hole in a field at West Musgrave Farm in St Helen Auckland, County Durham run by Darlington-based Albert Hill Skip Hire, was filled with mixed waste, including plastic, wood, cables, tyres, bricks and rubble, Teesside Crown Court heard.

Giving evidence at the trial of the firm's director, Paul Shepherd and his brother, Raymond Shepherd, John Robertson, of the Environment Agency, said that, while on a visit to the farm on June 8, 2010, he found deposits of small bits of metal, plastic and paper that looked as if they had been ‘put through a shredder’ in one of its fields.

While in another field, after removing the topsoil, he found bits of ceiling tubes, plastic bags and a flip-flop.

“There were a number of deposits in three fields that had been left in mounds and hadn’t been levelled,” he said. “In the fields near the farm they had obviously been there a while, within them had been plasterboard which had bits of plastic in.”

He also described the smell on the farm as that of “badly rotting onions mixed with waste from the site”.

Paul Shepherd, 56, denies allowing the company to operate a waste disposal site without a permit, ignoring a suspension notice and illegally depositing waste at the firm’s Whessoe Road depot.

His brother, Raymond, 58, also denies illegally depositing waste at the farm, operating a waste disposal site in Dodsworth Street, Darlington, without an Environment Agency permit, and flouting a suspension notice to stop trading as a waste transfer operation.

The trial continues.