COUNTRY LIFE
" POOR Devon," writes a native of that adorable shire. " Has any place suffered so badly? " This was written on the subject of Braunton Burrows in the north of Devon, but the south also has suffered severely, for example Slapton Ley and the beautiful Woodbury Common behind Budleigh Salterton. At all these sites, apart from threats of the future, the restoration has been quite needlessly slow. Concrete emplacements, barbed wire, roads and even minefields remain_ " The little hollow where nightjars used to nest " is now part of an ex-military road, and " the merlins have quite vanished." Such cries refer to many Devon places ; but Braunton is the supreme example because it has been given pride of place for the whole of the South-West by the Nature Reserves Investigation Committee in its report, National Nature Reserves and Conservation in England and Wales. It is in short supreme ; and the arguments of the military authorities that it is also supreme from their point of view are hopelessly unconvincing.
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