Shock at sight of Binns Moss illegal tipping
SO there I was practising all good sense while covering a story this afternoon.
I was checking on a few birds of prey, driving down from Holme Moss towards Woodhead, forty years since the first time I drove down this hill, and I was bathed in sunshine and happy memories.
But then, and although I’d like to say it beggars belief, it does not.
Holme Moss, at 1,719 feet, is high moorland on the border between the Holme Valley district of Kirklees in West Yorkshire and the High Peak district of Derbyshire in England.
The A6024 road between Holmfirth and Longdendale crosses the moor near its highest point close to Holme Moss transmitting station’s mast.
I was way back in the days of my youth as I cruised down, when bang, mounds of rubbish and building waste by the aptly named Binns Moss.
You couldn’t make it up. This Valley for me was always a bit of a ShangriLa, a peaceful haven packed with wildlife, and as you mount the summit near the mast the view is spectacular at anytime of year, you are virtually guaranteed a short-eared owl for your troubles.
This diurnal, daytime flying and hunting, bird of prey is one of the pin ups of the bird-world and I had high hopes that I would be rewarded as usual.
In this relatively short valley during my time, the ‘shorty’, was joined by little, tawny, barn and longeared owls, five species in a mile or so, and not forgetting the peregrine and merlin and the ever-present ‘foreman’ the kronking raven.
Also, cuckoos would criss-cross the valley for fun, and meadow pipits, wheatears and even ring ouzels kept their heads down.
My avian companions were well met with mountain hares, red foxes, badgers, weasels, stoats and roe deer.
After yesterday’s discovery there is the extra worry of all the small pieces of plastic blowing across the moor.
I collected many but it soon became a thankless task.
Woodhead and its environs have always been a place for secret dumping and when I worked for North West Water the items ranged from dead bodies to top-shelf magazines, so perhaps I had rose tinted glasses on with my mention of my
‘blessed place’?
The tale of an earthly paradise is among the most enduring myths in the world.
Not surprisingly, then, modern people have also been drawn to the dream of a lost paradise, a Shangri-La, which brings me back to the fly-tippers, and a verse from a song, The Men With No Soul, which I had a hand in writing thirty years ago.. ‘They deal in destruction, in fear and corruption, oh there’s no interrupting the men with no soul.’
The story of Shangri-La is a modern one, told by the English novelist James Hilton in Lost Horizon (1933).
The story was set in the troubled years before
World War Two, and tells of a community in a lamasery, in the lost Tibetan valley of Shangri-La, cut off from the world and from time.
All the wisdom of the human race is contained in this place. I am still pessimistic, and all relevant authorities have been informed.
If you were to see the hundreds and hundreds of comments, shares and likes on my Facebook and the pictures here, you may be encouraged that there still are good, caring and responsible people out there.