Open Country

Forget Texas! There's oil in the plains of Lincolnshire. But not many people seem to notice.Helen Mark travels to the market town of Gainsborough to discover more about the nodding donkeys that pepper its landscape. Oil wells sit comfortably fringed by a housing estate, the leisure centre and the golf course.It turns out that the East Midlands is the UK's second largest inshore oil producing area, courtesy of the Gainsborough Trough, once a deep and dirty patch of sea. Now it produces twelve hundred barrels of high quality oil a day, mostly pumped up by nodding donkeys.Whereas fracking attracts protest and controversy, local people seem quite content to live alongside these nodding pumps, perhaps because they look so benign - friendly even - and work away quietly with apparently little human intervention.Helen meets local teacher and long-distance runner Nigel Bowler, for whom the donkeys are a landmark on his running routes. There's artist Verity Barrett, who loved the pumps as a child, part of the 'scenic r