At one point in my childhood I fancied there might exist a world in which everything was upside down, where dark was light and, even better, wrong was right. It must have been at a time when the teacher returned much of my school arithmetic decorated with red crosses; it may also have coincided with a first introduction to a children's edition of Gulliver's Travels
Jonathan Swift would have found much to relish on Blacka. A 'Nature Reserve' where nature is discouraged and even attacked and a 'public pleasure ground' where managers contrive to cover an otherwise ideal picnic site with a disconcerting amount of freshly applied defecation. A place where the counter-intuitive goes well overboard into the simply perverse.
Only a sense of duty could persuade anyone to walk over Blacka's bare grassy sheep enclosure, but every once in a while it's necessary to remind oneself just how barmy the world can get in its pursuit of conformity - and ugliness.
The distribution of the sheep waste is generous across all parts with no favour: gateways, bridleways, tracks and paths, on the slopes, on the levels, higher parts and lower. These woolly chaps know their business, they really do. There's an excellent opportunity here for student statisticians to calculate, for example, the average number of direct hits likely on the boots of a blindfolded walker traversing the bridleway linking the two gates.
This year the managers have exceeded all expectations based on previous performance. Normally they are content to ensure there are enough of the woollies to forestall any wild flowers that might wish to see the light of day.
This year they've gone further and brought in mechanised assistance to ravage the remnants of nature that the livestock can't or won't demolish. Hundreds of thistles and others are now lying prone and lifeless across much of the lower parts. That'll learn 'em.
And by good luck or something else even the small areas of gorse have chosen to go into decline.
Those ungrateful souls who weary early of the stimulating showcase of excremental material are likely to exit via the gate leading down via the bridleway to Totley and Dore. A happy change awaits them: no more sheep waste:
Instead -
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