Balcombe, UK – It is a good day to test the defences of the protest camp that has sprung up on the outskirts of this southern English village, or the flood defences at least.

Rain lashes down on the small cluster of tents gathered around a police-guarded entrance in the Sussex countryside that has become the unlikely frontline in Britain’s battle over fracking.

Protesters and police have confronted each other daily since last Thursday after energy company Cuadrilla was granted a licence to conduct exploratory drilling for oil, with activists attempting to block the road to stop lorries getting through the gates.

While numbers have ebbed and flowed, by Tuesday the camp had the feel of something established for the long haul with a few dozen dedicated protesters sheltering under awnings, plastic ponchos and bin liners, boiling kettles on gas cylinders, or poking the flickering embers of camp fires.

The protest at Balcombe has brought together a strange alliance of well-heeled residents of a village that lies in the political heartland of prime minister David Cameron’s right-wing Conservative Party, environmental campaigners and remnants of the Occupy movement that set up camp in London in 2011.

Located in a designated area of outstanding natural beauty amid forested rolling hills, campaigners are concerned that drilling could lead to a subsequent application by Cuadrilla to use fracking, the controversial process of injecting high pressure chemicals into shale rock to release natural gas.

Locally, there are fears that a nearby reservoir could be polluted, with a poll of residents suggesting 82 per cent oppose fracking on the site.

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