...and as if that weren't bad enough...

...on the other side of the road there's a golf course. And another, the other side of that. One might be wandering about amongst the nice ferns and birches, minding one's own business (though obviously ignoring the sign a little further along pleasely requesting persons to not admit themselves) when all of a sudden the ferns could just burst into flame. Running to escape said flames to the nearest road one would then find one's ears assailed by the awful droning and blaring of golfy-people, probably discussing at length how clever the golf club is being by continually extending its grasp on the village by continually annexing further portions of broad-leaved deciduous woodland in order to build more bloody golf course. I was planning on taking a picture of The Tower on the Moor today but was thwarted from attempting to access it from Horncastle Road by a golf-club-looking van trundling around the little access road and prevented from reaching it from the spa trail by two golfing-people and a groundsman who were wandering around on precisely the section of golf course I needed to scuttle over in order to reach the tower from the north. Had the golfy-people not stolen the path from its rightful place along the course of the former railway then the amount of course over which scuttling would have been required would be significantly smaller. The unfortunate concentration of golfing-people in this little section of England despite the relative lack of popularity of the golfing compared to Scotland is one of the reasons why I dislike it so (apart from the clothing and the general sound and flavour of the practitioners I observed as a child). Since then they've greatly increased the amount of nasty little signs beside the path from Iddesleigh Road to Sandy Lane warning walking-people to look both ways and beg politely for permission to cross between the rapidly-thinning clumps of tree-cover in case a golfing-person is disturbed. There's plenty of completely treeless farmland all around the village they could easily buy if they wished to extend their golfing-facilities but they seem to insist on needlessly knackering perfectly good trees just so that they don't have to walk anywhere to get to the next bit of the course. It'd probably do them some good to have to walk a mile or so between holes and they could then probably do without the silly little steps built into some of their sand-filled hole-things for which the sides must be too steep for the exercise-shirking cart-wheeling people. Baagh.