Appalled by amount of litter found during walk

The route I’m on starts in a cut through lane between Leicester Street and Gresham Place, a pathway on the brow of Leicester Street. The native hedgerow along this path is bunged up with litter. There are supermarket bags waving at me from high branches. And,so many socially conscious doggy doo bags. All of them partially decomposed to matt black twists of plastic entwined in the ground covering bramble. The scramble of thorny blackberry bushes hide a carpet of crisp packets , takeaway cartons and styrofoam. Plastic bottles and beer cans bob in the undergrowth. They’ll be slowly taken down and will form an unwholesome strata of unbiodegradable muck.

I walk on to the end of the lane, it opens onto the top of Leicester Street where it’s opposite the entrance to Campion Hiils and the forelorn Lillington community noticeboard. I notice a green wheelie bin tossed into the hedgerow where it lies on its side. Its bulk has crushed the small trees and greenery. Alongside it a tangle of garden waste, thick branches of a mature forsythia it looks like, oh, and a plastic green washing line. There’s a recently dead blackbird in the area in front of the wheelie bin. The dead bird seems to say it all. Not a great walk so far.

I cross over the road to Campion Hills. This should be a nice place, an open place where kids play and people can breathe. It should be a place where wildlife has a fighting chance. But there is something sinister lurking in the trees and hedgerows, the detritus of people who don’t care about children, about nice safe places and who don’t care about wildlife. It’s not a surprise that the hedgerows and trees flanking Leicester Street on the Campion Hiils side are choked up with beer cans, plastic drinks bottles, glass drinks bottles, crisp packets, plastic bags (the supermarket and dog faeces bag variety) and many sweet wrappers. I find two eiderdown pillows thrown into a copse of blackthorn bushes opposite the mountain biking track. The card reader on my camera is full, it can’t take any more litter but I keep walking, following the stream of litter from the top to the bottom of the hill.

I’ve lived in this area for a few years and litter has always been a problem. One year I got three friends together and we cleared 18 sacks of rubbish plus heavy fly tipped objects from Campion Hills. A few people walked by and said “good work,” others asked if we would pick up their dog faeces for them. We said: “no. . Now the rubbish is steadily rising again.

The council has a duty of care, by law, to tackle areas they own where the rubbish is deemed to be a problem. I think my photo illustrates there is a high grade problem. I think Campion Hills and areas around it make a strong case for a regular clear-up. I can’t say what I think about the people who drop the litter, who flytip , who can only destroy. You’ll get your karma, that’s all. - Angela Owen, via email.