A Guiding Life

I told you about how the rubbish got to my local area of water This problem had me thinking about the straws that end up in turtles noses, or the plastic micro beads in fish that we eat. Could any of the rubbish left about as far away from the sea as you can get in the UK get to the sea?

Well it turns out it wasn't that difficult to work out the answer.

A plastic bottle left floating here, or even just sitting on the dried up shore in the summer.

Can get to the canal next work very quickly.

In the summer the over flow is dry.

In fact I've been up the tunnels that go under the road and stood under this grill - probably incredibly stupid, but there you go, I didn't think too hard about it at the time.

But once the water fills back up, it water pours down the overflow.

I was incredibly proud when I saw this first spill over of Winter 2020, there was no rubbish at the grid - I feel that has a lot to do with the 300+ bags of rubbish I removed from the area.

I had been in this, when it was dry. many times over the summer, clearing it of rubbish.

The water shoots down here,

and comes out here.

There is some grilling but not much.

And off it goes, Tampax tree (remember that?!) is the dark trunk top right!

The water that flows past 'tampax tree' mostly drains off to the fields unless it is incredibly wet then it joins a water course that heads under the canal, but we will follow the wider stretch of water that flows to the right.

There's been a heron down here for as long as I can remember, huge beast of a bird. It flies low along the water and then over the fields to the canal.