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.
