ABC Wednesday - W

W is for Wild.

Most days you'll find George and me walking over 'the tip'. This is the tip.

It used to be the old Council tip, where all the city's rubbish was dumped. A landfill site. When we first moved here about twenty years ago it had only been fairly recently closed. the first time we walked a dog over it, she came back and kept licking her paws frantically. We feared poison or acid had seeped out from the ground that was only lightly covered with soil and grass and we didn't walk there again for years.

But when we had Harvey, it soon became one of his favourite haunts. In the beginning we'd still see the foot of a wellie boot sticking up out of the ground, or various other bits of rubbish that weren't completely covered, but as the years went by, nature took over and now I don't think you'd know that it hadn't always been this Wild. I regularly see foxes and last week I saw my first rabbit. Herons even land in the wetland in the middle.

Nature has done a marvellous job of reclaiming its own. (Just after I took the above photo yesterday, we came across the body of a fox cub. I know that's nature too but a more upsetting side!)

At the far end of the tip is an old farmhouse. i guess the owners had to move out when the Council began to use the land as a rubbish dump. If you look carefully at the arch in the photo, you'll see that two trunks of the same tree have grown up on either side of the wall.

The prettier side of nature's restoration. Wild roses can be found all over the tip. I wish we had smellovision: the scent is fabulous.

P.S. I didn't stick my nose in the same time as the bee!

P.P.S. To take part or to see more ABC Wednesday photos, visit mrs nesbitts place
xx