A disappointing afternoon

Another rather grey day today, but not too cold as I set off for my post-lunch wander.  I must have chosen a bad route as I'd only been gone five minutes before I discovered that a number of trees along the top of the bank above the Hazedean housing scheme had been chopped - just bits hacked of without any obvious plan and big piles of branches everywhere. I turned off the road and up the burn through a piece of woodland that was supposedly given to the town by a local landowner years ago. It runs up behind a row of council houses and all sorts of junk had been tossed over the fence and down the bank; a stepladder, a compost bin, a plastic chair, a long plastic pipe, various plastic tubs and several rolls of fencing netting. It got better as I climbed away from the houses and eventually emerged on a tree-encircled, gorse-covered plateau, with nothing man-made in sight apart from electricity lines. Struggling through the bracken I approached the other side and looked down on the private houses in the woods beyond. Unfortunately the mess was the same - a derelict caravan (see extra) with all the windows smashed and a series of dilapidated sheds surrounded by rubbish and the remains of bonfires. I gained the lane and carried on down to the road, only a quarter of a mile from my house. All I could see were chopped trees surrounded by piles of brash, all I could hear was a man with a chainsaw, cutting down another tree. When I arrived home I could hear another chainsaw going in the other direction. I tried to be positive and to assume that whoever was using it was cutting up logs! I would have been better to have stayed at home and exercised by running up and down the drive!

Quote of the Day:

Ruskin Bond - "But men are cutting down the trees without replacing them. For every tree that's felled, we must plant two. Otherwise, one day, there'll be no forests at all, and the world will become one great desert."