COUNTRY LIFE
What Winter Reveals
A great number of pleas for aid in protecting rural peace and beauty are continually being received by the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, on many heads ; a brick factory at Hambledon in Surrey ; housing " develop- ment," so called, at the lovely Sennen Cove in Cornwall ; a holiday camp at Sidmouth ; on ribbon development in a score of places, and on needless tree-felling by builders of both houses and factories. A great deal of dis- figurement by such means and by advertisements has been prevented by local energy as in respect of petrol stations at Southport and hoardiags by the Somerset County Council. It would be difficult to praise too highly the beneficent activity of the C.P.R.E. in such matters ; but there are smaller if more general disfigurements that remain uncontrolled, and perhaps can only be controlled by a public sense of decency. As the leaves fall, and hedge and bush become diaphanous and the season earns its attribute of open, the quite horrible amount of refuse, especially tins and cardboard, thrown into hedge and bush and ditch becomes acutely visible. The worst offender, as Sir Arnold Wilson has insisted, is not the walker or the cyclist, but the picnicking motorist of a wholly urban outlook. He regards the country as an excellently convenient dustbin, and seems scarcely to be aware that leaves will fall and disclose the grim extent of the furtive shoot- ing of his rubbish. Since he selects the more obvious sites for his picnics the accumulation of his rubbish may amount to a public eyesore. It is quite true to maintain that both cyclist and hiker show a finer sense of what is due to the country.
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