By: Blonde Two
The Two Blondes took some of their brightest and best young people to do a little bit of voluntary Dartmoor work yesterday. We will tell you more about that soon but today, I want to tell you about a question that has been bothering me since we got home.
Dartmoor is a wonderful place, countless (well we have never counted them) people enjoy it. We enjoy it on foot, on horseback, on bikes, in canoes – sometimes we even enjoy it on toboggans. We come in cars, in coaches, in droves, in minibuses, in teams, in the rain, in the sunshine, more often in the mist. And we take our pleasure, however gentle or exciting that pleasure is and then we go home again.
Now we Blondes would like to think that we do our bit. Look at our youngsters; as well as learning how to navigate their way around Dartmoor and heave back-packs up its many hills, we teach them to appreciate and care for their environment. They know how to leave only footprints, they know to shut gates and they know how to sit and stare at the stars.
But how about giving a bit more back to our moor? Do we really do that? The next question has to be, “How can we fit any more Dartmoor in?” Pondering is going on in Blonde heads as you read this and you might like to ask yourself the same questions. What do any of us do, really do, to ensure that our beautiful space (it doesn’t really matter which beautiful space) remains beautiful?
Very often the most useful thing you can do is also one of the nastiest – litter picking! There are some wonderful people who automatically take a carrier bag out walking with them and come home with it stuffed full of other people’s rubbish; I’ve seen them; maybe we could all do it once or twice a year in a favourite place.
That reminds me about the Nepalese authorities ruling that climbers on Everest will have to bring back 8kg of rubbish with them in an attempt to clear up the peak. You are right – a very good idea.