Prim path swallows up the Amazons
by Derek Niemann from Environment | The Guardian on (#X7H9)
Sandy, Bedfordshire The spell broke, shrubs were cleared in the playground of imagination, and we were ruining it
The London to Edinburgh railway line, the HS2 of its day, cut through a slice of countryside at Sandy. Victorian navvies left a trackside vertical cliff, and then, after the work of those excavators, the natural diggers moved in.
At least 50 pairs of sand martins used to nest in the sand face. A painting on an RSPB fireplace is the only visual record, however, for the cliff was subsequently quarried away. Today, the site is a broad, sand bottomed bowl, rimmed by woody terraces.
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