What are YOU doing?

Wednesday, I felt compelled to take a little walk in the area… no real reason perhaps, but with all the signs of autumn starting to show, I considered it a great time to take the camera out – the sun was shining, the birds were singing and the mood just felt right for some reason..

I loaded my pocket full of nuts, grabbed my camera and set about my little walk. Well, someone recently sculpted a ‘Green Man’ figure from an old tree trunk, and I considered checking to see how he was looking. I also noted that the footpath at the side here and  next to the police station had been painted with wildlife scenes, so I filmed it in preference to taking a picture as there was just too much to fit in one frame…

I got to the edge of the footpath and switched the camera off, time to take in the atmosphere, check on the green man and head back… usually, thats 20 minutes in regular terms.

I got to the field where the Green Man stands and stood back among the shade of the trees to soak up some shade and admire the changing leaves on the trees….  a squirrel ran past me at the bottom of the gully, and I had to watch – being as I am a squirrel loving type.

As I watched, I noticed something…. car tyres.. a few, yeah, thats the norm down there anyway, plus the build up of detritus and other rubbish… it does spoil it, and I hadn’t reported it for a while as I’d normally do as nothing ever got done anyway.

But as I noticed, the amount of tyres just became obscene, there were hundreds of them, all dumped down the steep side of the gully.

I felt sick with rage and the couple of pics I tried to get were either obscured by trees or too blurred….

I was fuming… and couldn’t wait to get back home to report it all.

I found all the online forms I needed to fill in, I messaged people, emailed – everything… took me the best part of the rest of the day to get the word out.

The responses I’ve had are positive however. Although the automated response from the council made me feel dubious about their intentions, ‘we’ll send someone round to look at it within the next ten days’ – bog standard stuff, hardly worth the effort.

More emails went out. I contacted a local councillor, the local newspaper and several other outlets and organisations.

It’s time for the council to stop the ignorance and get the woodland here cleaned up and make it safer – not just for the people who walk down that path regularly (by the woodland) but to make it safer for the wildlife too. It’s their home. The amount of rubbish thrown down there is probably the reason why so many of the animals I see around here are either disabled or injured in some way – this cannot go on.

There aren’t the facilities here for treating wildlife, yet, if there’s going to be a massive open tip in the countryside, there ought to be.

So again, we’ve been failed.

Trees are falling over because of the neglect, the rivulet that runs from the bottom of the garden here is choked to death from the pollution… and you know something? Every time I walk that way, I see beyond that and see a woodland teeming with life and bristling with energy and birdsong. I see a glorious greenspace fit only for the wildlife while we humans stick to that footpath…  I see bluebells in the spring, a carpet of glorious hues of purple…

And here’s something for you to digest: If you’re caught fly-tipping (Illegal dumping) the maximum is a large fine and 5 years imprisonment….

Check these two videos out - both shot on the same footpath a year and a half apart.