12/06/2026
๐ฉ๐ผ๐น๐๐ป๐๐ฒ๐ฒ๐ฟ ๐๐ฝ๐ผ๐๐น๐ถ๐ด๐ต๐: ๐๐๐ซ๐ค ๐๐๐ญ๐ก-๐๐จ๐ก๐ง
Mark Meth-Cohn was tearing his hair out over BT responses that would not help them in any way and said they had no plans to upgrade such a rural area in the future. Hincaster was falling behind the digital world. Markโs IT guy, who lived in Silverdale, told him about the plans to connect their parish to B4RN.
He investigated and found out that the network had gone live in Quernmore, and things looked promising. He got in touch with Barry, who investigated the plans and the nearest connections, and told him it was possible. He was amazed that they had no offices or staff, yet were still helping people where BT could, or would, not. It looked like B4RN was his only viable option, so he went to the parish council and explained it all, and they were all well up for it. Mark had a background in project management and civil engineering, so he quickly got to grips with Barryโs plan and started coordinating it.
He spoke to all the landowners and farmers, who were all very keen to help and get a connection too. They split the project into two phases; the first phase was to get from J36 to Hincaster. To do this, he had to dig from where the Hutton Roof project had got to, and from there up to the motorway junction.
He got the funding for this from Egg Homes, which was building a luxury housing development in the area, because nobody was interested in buying million-pound homes with less than a megabit of broadband. Tony Swidenbank did the digging and got it to them. Mark sorted all the wayleaves and mapping.
As this was happening, the residents of Hincaster came to believe it would happen, and Mark split the area into zones around each chamber, nominated one person to control it, and the local digs all started.
His full story is in Chapter 10 in the B4RN book, where you can read all about his adventure.
https://book.b4rn.community/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/chapter-10.pdf
