Scrubland

The Runtlings, Ossett; The winter hedgerows are busy with birds: Greenfinch, Great Tit, Long-tailed Tit and – probing the leaf-litter beneath trees – a few Redwings. A Kestrel hovers over the rough, grassy mounds on waste-ground around Dewsbury Sewage Works.

In my childhood, rough grassland dotted with thorns was a familiar habitat around old collieries, factories and railway sidings. Much of this ‘brown land’ has now been reclaimed for housing and office parks, and today, when more thought goes into landscape design, areas that would once have been left as derelict have been transformed into community parks with fishing ponds, copses and little meadow areas but, because of my childhood memories of roaming around post-industrial landscapes, I feel a touch of nostalgia for these pockets of unkempt scrubland, the hunting ground of the Kestrel.