News just in: Blencathra has been sold to an un-named party. The sale is a blow to the group Friends of Blencathra, who this week put in a bid to secure the mountain for the community, having run a high profile fundraising campaign that attracted pledges of financial support from thousands.
© Ice Nine, Jan 2011
The seller's agents say the mountain property went for more than the £1.75M asking price, and that the winning bid was much higher than that offered by the community group.
However, it has since emerged that the Friends had already offered to match the winning bid, having been told of it before the sale was announced.
The group's chair Debbie Cosgrove told the BBC:
'What we said was that we would literally need to just look at what we would do, how we would do it and come back to them.'
'Before we'd even had time to do it my phone started going, saying that the news had already gone out that we'd lost it, so we are absolutely bemused.'
So who is the mystery buyer - a sharp edged Russian oligarch, a Chinese sovereign fund, or simply a secretive hill walker with saddlebags of cash to burn?
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