Slicing its way through the countryside is a 55-mile underground pipeline that will deliver aviation fuel to Heathrow from Southampton.

The Southampton to London Pipeline (SLP) project is replacing 90km of the underground fuel pipeline between Boorley Green in Hampshire and the West London Terminal fuel storage facility in Hounslow.

It passes close to Bramdean going under the A272, before skirting Alton and on to London.

Scheduled to be completed next year, it replaces a buried pipeline that has come to the end of its useful life after 50 years.

Exxon Mobil, which owns Esso, says the new pipeline will take 100 fuel tankers off the roads every day.

But protestors say it passes through areas described in an official report as a ‘stronghold’ for dormice, and that trees have been unnecessarily felled along its route.