Prim path swallows up the Amazons

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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