Cycling & Recycling

Horse chestnut leaves emerging 

 Friday was a beautiful spring day, with a bright blue sky and fluffy white clouds.  John and I went for a walk around Mytholmroyd in the Calder valley.  Trees were just coming into leaf, and there were celandines in the woods.  (And lots of dandelions in flower, too, but we don't talk about them.) 

Sycamore leaves and flowers 

Celandines

 The walk did a loop either side of the road up Cragg Vale, which will be part of the Tour de France route in July - it's a well-known cycling challenge.
  

It was a nice walk, with a mixture  of woods, fields, and open moor.  Towards the end, we crossed a small area which is now permissive access land, and has been furnished with a new fence and new gates.  And the fence and gate posts have all been topped with an assortment of re-used plastic containers - coleslaw tubs, washing-up liquid bottles cut in half, the bottoms cut of milk bottles, etc.   They have all been nailed on to the posts, and I assume that it's intended to protect the wood (although the gates appear to have been treated with preservative as well).  

Reusing and recycling plastic is a good thing in other contexts, and you see a variety of re-purposed plastic on allotments (bottles, pots and tubs of all shapes and sizes, odd bits of string).  But in the countryside it just looks ugly.