By Dylan Wall

The amount of litter on the streets has always irked me, so moving from Bristol to the middle of the Devon countryside I was massively disappointed to note while out running that this was not just an issue confined to cities and towns.

Fortunately, as part of HPW’s Charity Day I was able to remedy this for a very small part of my new home county, taking a half day and undertaking a litter pick of my local lanes.

Over the course of a four-hour walk to the next village and beyond, a distance spanning 7.3km (or 14.6 km of hedgerows given that I cleared both sides) – I collected large 6 bags’ worth of litter, as well as three tyres!!

The most common objects I picked up were empty drink cans, mainly beer and energy drinks. It seems there’s a worrying amount of literal drink-driving that goes on in the countryside as I can only assume these have been thrown from a car window.

The most peculiar item I found was a frying pan!

On a more positive note, one elderly couple driving past stopped and thanked me for my efforts. I also bumped into a neighbour who said he often goes out and does the same, and how glad he was that someone else was also doing their bit.

Once home and with the rubbish sorted, I managed to fill all our recycling boxes to overflowing (two with cans and plastic, one with glass). Unfortunately, due to poor timing on my part this was the day after our own recycling had been collected – cue two weeks of living with an ever increasing pile of our own recycling in the corner of the kitchen.

And the three tyres? These are now being enjoyed by our six chickens who, when combining them with the four tyres I collected from a ditch last year, are using them as a climbing frame.