tricky underfoot

Ice ice ice

This weekend's DofE walk was cancelled, because of the snow and ice, but I decided that I would still be absolutely fine to go for my circular walk around the back... even though Handsome had mentioned that the roads were a tad icy on his drive back from Edinburgh.

The roads were fine... which is the first third of my walk, after that there was a stretch of rutted path which was completely covered in five inch deep ice from verge to verge, and as the verges are completely covered in feral rhodedendrans, it's not as if you can walk there. I had to carefully place one foot before I moved the other, and sometimes there was just no-where where you could get grip at all. But I got lots of exercise skiting about along half a mile or so of sheer ice!

Even with all the ice, someone had still managed to get a vehicle up there in order to dump their rubbish - why on earth do people do that? In the middle of a small farm track that goes no-where, amongst the trees at the side, someone had dumped a pile of varicoloured plastic toy-boxes, some paint tins and an old settee... It's not as if we don't have a dump nearby, we do, and it's free. Just laziness.

There is a website and a freephone number where you can report these things, but they're only interested if you've actually seen someone dumping the stuff and can give them a registration number. I have to contact the council to actually get it cleared up, and as the minute they do so someone else will dump something, understandably, they take their time.

Today, however, I saw no-one else at all who was mad enough to be walking and sliding in the cold, but I did enjoy it, despite that.