A Beautiful Winter's Day?!

yep, Winter has finally arrived in these beautiful Leicestershire hills - only 6 months too late!! Agility was cancelled today as the indoor hall was in use and the equipment would've been too slippy, so instead Tracy and I took Mollie dog for a walk in our local woods, and managed to find some small pockets of snow. As you can see from the above, Mollie also managed to find quite a bit of mud!! Oh, the joy of having a white dog...

I think you'll agree, although my photos really don't do it justice, that our local woods are quite lovely. And thanks to a dedicated group of locals called Friends Of Holly Hayes Woods, they should hopefully be cleaned up in the coming months. This wonderful group of people have managed to raise and secure enough funding to buy the woods and adjoining fields off the local quarry company so that it can be cleaned up (it's currently full of rubbish - you can see pics on their website) and returned to it's former glory. Hopefully I'll manage to get to the next cleanup session and help out, but even after just what they've done in the last couple of weeks, you can notice the difference. Brambles have been cut back, trees trimmed, paths cleared, rubbish removed - and it already has a different feel to it. Call me a sentimental old bat, but the woods are starting to feel loved. I really hope that other communities can find inspiration in what ours has achieved, and save their own little pockets of paradise from becoming off-road bike tracks and rubbish tips.

From burbling brook to raging torrent

Spare a thought for the staff of Dogs Today magazine, who had to evacuate last week as the waters rose at their offices in Chobham, Surrey. Beverley Cuddy has posted some piccies on her Cold Wet Nose blog of the waters rising. As she says, even with a couple of inches of water they'll have to replace the carpets and replaster; luckily (for us!) they put the next issue to bed with what sounds like minutes to spare.
I think more and more that we're quite lucky here in Leicestershire. We have a bit of flooding around Rothley and Sileby - but that always happens when there's heavy rain. In fact there's a stretch of road that goes under the A6 that is closed most of the Winter because it floods. Most of the flood plains are fallow fields, used for grazing in the summer but left empty in the Winter because they flood - these are flooded now but with minimal damage to crops. Other flood plains, such as Watermead park near Wanlip (and of course the lovely Sence Valley Forest Park!!), are country parks. Whitwick has flooded in the past as the normally picturesque and burbling brook has swollen to river size and broken its banks - but this summer, although it's definitely been much deeper than usual, the village has escaped largely unscathed thanks to significant work carried out on the flood defences last year. Mercifully, we live on a hill - so although our garden is absolutely sodden (clay soil = no drainage!), we won't flood. It all drains down into the valley..

Save Our SSSI

Speaking of the valley, some people local to us are trying to raise money to save our woods from developers, clean them up and turn them into a real focus for the community. I'm confident that the campaign will succeed and I look forward to helping out when the clean-up begins - at the moment we're always on the lookout for teenagers on motorbikes and broken glass, it'll be nice to get the area cleared of rubbish and shut the yobs out. The addition of poo bins would be good, too...