--- title: "Residents rake a Greenpeace mural off a burnt Welsh mountainside" description: "Greenpeace painted a 1,120 square metre image of Prime Minister Andy Burnham pouring oil onto flames on ground above Capelulo that had burned in a wildfire weeks earlier. Two residents removed it with garden rakes the following evening, with the landowner's permission." category: "World" category_url: https://newsparlor.com/category/world author: "Priya Sharma" published: 2026-08-21T13:39:46.000Z updated: 2026-08-21T13:39:46.000Z canonical: https://newsparlor.com/article/residents-rake-a-greenpeace-mural-off-a-burnt-welsh-mountainside tags: ["wales", "greenpeace", "wildfires", "protest", "climate-policy"] --- # Residents rake a Greenpeace mural off a burnt Welsh mountainside Greenpeace painted a 1,120 square metre image of Prime Minister Andy Burnham pouring oil onto flames on ground above Capelulo that had burned in a wildfire weeks earlier. Two residents removed it with garden rakes the following evening, with the landowner's permission. On August 17, Greenpeace painted a [1,120 square metre image on the Sychnant Pass in Eryri National Park, in Conwy, north Wales](https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/news/activists-paint-giant-climate-warning-to-burnham-on-mountainside-scorched-by-wildfires/). It showed Prime Minister Andy Burnham pouring oil and gas onto flames, with the words "Our house is on fire Andy". The ground it was painted on had burned in a wildfire in July. The following evening, two local people removed it with garden rakes. ## Why Greenpeace put it there The organisation said the artwork was timed to the final day of public consultation on the Rosebank oil field, and that it was protesting the approval of Rosebank and the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea. [Greenpeace argued the prime minister's stated pragmatism sits badly against approving new North Sea drilling while communities face the consequences of a warming climate](https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/news/activists-paint-giant-climate-warning-to-burnham-on-mountainside-scorched-by-wildfires/), and it put Rosebank's lifetime emissions at 254 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. The choice of site was the argument. A hillside burned by a wildfire, in the summer, in Wales, was intended to collapse the distance between a licensing decision in the North Sea and its consequences on the ground. ## Why residents took it off That was not how people living below the hill read it. The fire above [Capelulo burned around 200 acres and forced the evacuation of 36 properties](https://uk.news.yahoo.com/andy-burnham-house-fire-mural-124419141.html) in July, and the village was still in the early stages of recovering from it. [Allie Evans, 53, a mobile hairdresser, and Dean Ward, from Rhos on Sea, went up on the evening of August 18 with two garden rakes and broke up the paint, raking the flakes into the soil](https://uk.news.yahoo.com/andy-burnham-house-fire-mural-124419141.html). Some of it had hardened too much to shift. Evans had [permission from the landowner, Helen Rowlands, who was also unhappy about the mural](https://uk.news.yahoo.com/andy-burnham-house-fire-mural-124419141.html), which makes the removal an authorised act on private land rather than a counter-protest. Evans said she could not [remember "having been so angry and upset all at once"](https://uk.news.yahoo.com/andy-burnham-house-fire-mural-124419141.html), and that the mural was ["so disrespectful to the landscapes. It was also an intrusion into local grief"](https://uk.news.yahoo.com/andy-burnham-house-fire-mural-124419141.html). Ward wrote online that he had thought ["Greenpeace was all about leave no trace and you do this"](https://uk.news.yahoo.com/andy-burnham-house-fire-mural-124419141.html). ## Greenpeace's answer Areeba Hamid, co-director of Greenpeace UK, said the artwork was ["temporary by design: created with a water-based paint often used on sports turf"](https://uk.news.yahoo.com/andy-burnham-house-fire-mural-124419141.html). Greenpeace has said the paint was plastic-free and was applied to ground already stripped of vegetation by the fire. That answer addresses the ecological objection and not the other one. Ward's complaint was about environmental consistency, and it has a technical response. Evans' complaint was that a place where people had recently been evacuated from their homes had been used as a canvas without being asked, and no property of the paint speaks to that. ## The disagreement underneath Both positions here are coherent, which is what makes the episode more interesting than a row about vandalism. Protest movements have always used charged locations, because a message placed where the harm is visible carries further than the same message on a placard. The cost is that the place belongs to people who did not choose to become an illustration, and who may not agree that their misfortune proves the point being made. Greenpeace would say the connection between fossil fuel licensing and wildfire risk is real, and that declining to make it visible for fear of causing offense concedes the argument. Residents of Capelulo would say that a hillside they watched burn above their houses is not an argument, and that the difference between the two is the whole of the objection. Neither side has retracted anything. The hillside is bare again, and the Rosebank consultation has closed. ## Sources - [Activists paint giant climate warning to Burnham on mountainside scorched by wildfires](https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/news/activists-paint-giant-climate-warning-to-burnham-on-mountainside-scorched-by-wildfires/) - [Andy Burnham 'house on fire' mural on scorched Conwy hill destroyed by locals](https://uk.news.yahoo.com/andy-burnham-house-fire-mural-124419141.html)