The vote was 3-2, and it was Alderman George Firth who made it so.

The Works Committee convened at ten o’clock yesterday morning in the Municipal Chamber to consider Dr Bernard Coates’s proposal for a 2.3-kilometre graded road from the Dunvale road to the Greymoor monitoring station site. The estimated cost: 45,000 florins. The debate lasted ninety minutes. The margin was one vote.

Firth, who chairs the committee and whose position had been undeclared through weeks of public speculation, spoke last. His remarks were brief.

“The science requires access,” he said. “The uplands require protection. This road is the narrowest possible answer to both.”

The conditions attached to the approval are extensive. The road is restricted to scientific and agricultural vehicles only. There is to be no public access beyond the monitoring station. A seasonal weight limit applies from November to March, when the upland tracks are soft. And the Royal Institute must post a 5,000-florin restoration bond — a guarantee that if the station is ever decommissioned, the road will be removed and the land returned to its prior state.

Alderman Jessop voted against, citing insufficient consultation with upland residents beyond the two farmers who gave evidence at the March hearing. “Two farmers is not the Greymoor uplands,” he said. Alderman Greening also dissented, on similar grounds.

The road has been a point of contention since Dr Coates first proposed it on 26 March. Gareth Penn, the sheep farmer at Highfield Farm who has watched the Greymoor glow from his kitchen window since February, supported the proposal as a practical necessity. Isobel Dallow of Ridgetop Farm opposed it, fearing sightseers and traffic on the ridge. “A road brings traffic,” she told the committee last month. “Once you build a road, you cannot unbuild it.”

The restoration bond is a direct response to Dallow’s concern. Whether it satisfies her remains to be seen. She was not present at yesterday’s vote.

Penn was. He sat in the public gallery and said nothing afterwards.

The practical consequence is immediate. Three wagons of Northcroft Instruments equipment — broadband seismometers, atmospheric gas sampling units, a meteorological mast, and a photometric array — have been parked at Dunvale junction since Tuesday, awaiting the committee’s decision. They may now proceed to the station site. Construction of the road itself is expected to take six weeks.

Professor Aldous Nettleford, whose three-night assessment of the Greymoor phenomenon was completed this week, has recommended an expanded survey programme that will depend on reliable vehicular access to the ridge. The road, whatever its political cost, is now the prerequisite for understanding what is happening beneath it.