My film-maker friend walked out with her camera with a long fluffy sock over the microphone and I took nothing; no camera, no pen, no ‘phone. I don’t want to be in the film but she recorded me as I walked up Pretty Road with its tall overhanging hedgerows and trees covered in ivy. I have biked up and down these lanes since I was able to ride a tricycle. Lavender from the farm used to deliver unpasteurised milk in glass bottles with bright coloured tops every day and we watched the cows have their milk suctioned from muddy udders and swirled in a massive vat which is still there in the view from my office window, a round building with a red conical top like the Tin Man’s hat.
She filmed the butchery outside my neighbour’s house, into the sun. We guessed where the compound is going by the blue string on sticks. There is now a gap in the trees at the edge of the farmer’s cattle field with one tree left, upright, balletic, reaching to the sky. There is a new men at work sign: TREE CUTTING. The area of ecological sensitivity sign has fallen into the long grass and brambles.
I visited the Oak Woodlands in the Botannical Gardens in Edinburgh at Half Term.
I walked the length of the edge of the old field, now a row of jagged stumps, and listened to the extraordinary bird song. One sings, the other echoes a response. I cross the bridge and hear the song thrush again, further round above the white blossom and brambles. I return to the road where we can line up our deckchairs and leave my friend filming the weapon of mass desecration, a crane in a neat square of four fences.
I stood by the ditch and listened. I spied a wren.
The archaeological dig starts Monday. We are holding a vigil tonight at sunset. We shall picnic, knit, light tee lights. The man from the Suffolk Project on Instagram is coming. Farmers from Glemham are coming. The knitter from the village craft group is coming.
Can someone please explain to me how cutting down three hundred years worth of trees is clean, green or sustainable?
ness365 