Paradise lost? (From Droitwich Advertiser)

Paradise lost?

7:10am Friday 5th February 2010

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A solitary chirp of a winter robin rings out as it skips and flits through the dense canopy.

It sings to the wood, calling all that dwell there out of hibernation to the peace of the new spring. The morning dew hangs from the grass with determination not to be shaken to the cold floor. Brittle branches, starved of light and warmth, bend under the weight of the frost that dances across its blooming leaves. Picture this. The Lickey Hills. The wild in all its beauty.

Every morning I awake to this perfection and it makes me forget of all the troubles in this life and in this world.

It was my own piece of heaven right across the street, which I could almost reach out and touch.

However, up until recent weeks, this natural beauty of the little robin’s world had been destroyed.

As many will know, on Twatling Road, near its junction with Lickey Square and the Lickey Hills, idle workers left their polluting machines loitering around the area causing all manner of chaos with their frustrating barriers and ill-functioning traffic lights.

If this inconvenience on an already hardly navigable crossing isn’t enough trouble, the picturesque view of beauty was tarnished beyond recognition. This gateway to the wild had been transformed into a building site with cones and diggers strewn across the lay-bys that open into the woods.

The contractors that performed this operation used a huge orange shipping container to house their villainous machines. This hunk of junk was a blight on the landscape, ridden with graffiti and hung with the stench of urban living that I moved to Barnt Green to get away from.

Thankfully these physical and visual hindrances have gone, but not long forgotten. However the problems they have caused have not disappeared.

Granted, the pipe and road works the contractors did were a good job, but the destruction they have left behind is certainly not. The lay-bys they used to store their tools were not structurally sound in the first place, but now they have crumbled and dissolved under the weight of industry.

And so to cut my own infernal ranting short my question to the council and anyone who knows is this – what is going to be done about the state of road surfacing on Lickey Hill lay-bys on Twatling Road and road surfaces along Warren Road?

Jake Perryman, aged 14, via email

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