Protestors marched across Whitehaven to campaign against a £165m mine planned for West Cumbria.

Members of the Extinction Rebellion marched from the Haig Pit museum to Copeland Council's Market Hall to show their opposition to the scheme.

Plans to extract coking coal off the coast of St Bees, with a processing plant on the former Marchon site at Kells were given the go-ahead in March.

Melanie Greggain, who organised the protest, said: "We are in a climate emergency right now. Governments around the world have declared a climate emergency and I think global warming needs to be at the forefront of our minds and everything we do.

"If we are going to move forward in life and in the world we need to actually find better ways to make materials like steel. It needs to move forward at a quicker pace. We can't keep taking fossil fuels out of the ground. We can't just keep drilling huge holes into the side of the earth.

"If the climate rises we are going to see more floods in Cumbria. We have already seen devastating floods. Wildlife is dying out.

"We completely understand that people need jobs. We are not attacking people who need jobs. What we are saying is we need to be bale to create jobs that are not going to make the planet worse off."

Marianne Birkby, of the Keep Cumbria Coal in the Hole group said: "It's just such close proximity to Sellafield and it's going closer than any other coal mine in this area has done before. That's what first alerted us then when you see the massive green house gas emissions, methane emissions, possible subsidence of the Irish Sea bed. There's stuff that we really don't want to move."

Martin Kendall, who lives at High Walton, near St Bees, said: "I have got their coal loading facility in my back yard. I'm going to overlook it, I'm going to hear it, there's going to be loads of light, loads of noise. It's going to be a huge complex."