December 7th – it was a beautiful afternoon with a very unpleasant wind, but the sun and commons of Brownhills were a joy to behold. The heaths and scrub glowed beautifully, as did the canal embankments.

These days it’s hard to imagine these beautiful places have a harsh, lingering industrial legacy.

Looking for deer near the site of the lost Coombe House, at Coppice Side, I spotted this monitoring well, a int of a none-too-pleasant past; this is the edge of a former landfill and boreholes like this are regularly unlocked and ‘dipped’ to monitor contamination. The EX symbol warns of an explosive gas hazard – methane, mostly, from rotting refuse buried underground.

This is a problematic site and will require monitoring for many years to come. 

I looked up from it to see the backside of a young hind disappearing into the the copse…