Tuesday Photo Challenge – Land

Land………….. such a wide variety of possible takes on such a simple word.
This is my response to jansenphoto Dutch Goes the Photo challenge this week

https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/43011194/posts/1319894474

I loved the open heathland as a girl.
We would take our sugar sandwiches and bottles of pop up the dusty track to the top of the hill, seeing slow worms and sand lizards on our way.
If we were lucky, we’d see tadpoles and newts swimming in the pools, not to mention the beautiful butterflies, dragonflies and damsel flies in their fluorescent colours.
Stag beetles, voles, even tiny mice were likely to cross our path, but by the time I was 7, things began to change.
In 1963, fifty nine houses and 68 bungalows were on the drawing boards to be completed by the end of the following year.
An ‘Aunt’ by friendship rather than relation was one of the first to live there, originally in a cul-de-sac that became one of the roads in and out within ten years.
More and more land was claimed, pushing Nature to one side as they polluted the heathland and surrounding environment with their bulldozers, property developments and infrastructure.
Today it stands as one of the largest housing estates in Europe.

In another vein, we saw (in our opinion) mass destruction in Lincolnshire, where trees were felled for profit, only to lay and rot in the mud whilst others were marked to follow.
Walks we enjoyed, listening to the bird song or watching wildlife scurry to the safety of the tree roots as we sat on old tree trunks became obstacle courses, quagmires of black slime and stinking decay. In the eerie silence, no pleasure was found, no beauty seen.
From the beauty and pleasure of our walks in the woods above

To this, the last time we saw it.Note:
photos in this post are my own.

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