PARADISE LOST ?

I took this picture some months ago when the weather was kind and the living was easy.  Fish were jumping and the cotton was high.  It shows a stretch of the Pilgrims Way in this part of Kent en route between Winchester and Canterbury.   Most weekends we take our retriever, Dudley, for a decent walkies in what Kent County Council have declared `The Kent Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.`  

And it sure is - it takes a while to find the Pilgrims Way itself but it is really well worth the effort.   As the seasons come and go, we notice the changes that take place as nature treads its steady path and we notice too the changes in the way the Way is treated by its visitors.  And it is as curious as it is predictable.  All through the months of good weather we often have the place to ourselves, maybe because there are other places to explore, but when winter arrives this area seems to attract more and more people and more `activity.`

And what is predictable is the way in which the footpath is used;  we just walk it but today we came across a handful of other walkers, some with doggy companions, some not.  But we also came across cyclists - gangs of them all togged up in their cycling gear - a selection of runners, two of them with dogs on leads dutifully running along with them; but perhaps most dispiriting were motor cyclists, trail bikes I imagine, not only making too much noise for the `area of outstanding natural beauty` but also making sure the path, which was muddy to begin with, became something of a quagmire. It all felt a bit like rush hour on the Pilgrims Way but without the pilgrims.

We trudged our way round for a couple of hours but it was not the happiest walkies we have had.  Now I shouldn`t complain about people getting out in the countryside, exercising, enjoying the scenery - well, it`s what we do ourselves -  but we might just have to find somewhere else where the paradise of summer is not lost in the mud bath of winter.