LEDBURY Town Council is facing a hefty bill to replace the lighting conductor on the cemetery chapel, off New Street, after it failed a routine test.

The cost of replacing the conductor is almost £1500, and remedial work to the stonework of the bell could add an extra £1,000 to the bill.

Cllr Martin Eager, a member of the town's environment and leisure committee said: "This arose from a routine inspection for our insurers; lightning conductors on tall structures are designed to take the high voltage lightning strike to 'earth' in the most expedient and a path of least resistance.

"The most common way is using a copper strip which conducts electricity most efficiently; attached to the structure and buried into the soil, the resistivity is the path into the ground the lightning strike takes. This is measured in Ohms, zero Ohms is zero resistance, which is very unusual, and the usual test for lightning conductors requires a maximum of ten Ohms."

The problem is that the chapel's lightning conductor is showing too much resistance, perhaps because of corrosion.

Cllr Eager said: "It is common that over a period of time the copper strip becomes less conductive because of air pollution, environmental factors and weather; these same factors also apply to the ground where the strip is buried.

"In our case to satisfy current requirements our lightning conductor requires replacing and probably deeper grounding; this is a very common issue as changes in requirements are continually updated and air pollution from cars increases."

Town councillors did consider removing the lightning conductor entirely, but took advice and ruled this out.

Cllr Eager said: "There are schools of thought that unoccupied buildings such as the chapel do not require a lightning conductor; we briefly investigated this route but were advised that this was a requirement to satisfy our insurers."