About a month ago I went for a walk along the path in the woods behind our house. It had been raining a lot and I wanted to have a look at how well the drainage stream there was coping – its a way to pass the time during a drought…

A couple of years ago this area used to flood regularly. At the corner of Tollgate Hill and Hollingbourne Crescent there was some sort of blockage in the sluice where the stream went underground. On the most memorable flood, the waters got so high that they overflowed onto the road, leaving about water at least 40cm deep. (memorable because that is exactly where our old Astra conked out the night before. When we called the AA next morning it was underwater.)

Whenever the council were looking at flood prevention I mentioned this location, but other places got priority as a result of greater publicity – and to be fair, a much greater effect on properties. It turned out that someone must have been listening after all as, last year, the bulldozers moved in and ripped the area part.

Several trees were removed so that the heavy plant could get in and then the stream was practically re-dug and all the banks were built up with fresh mud. By the time they finished it looked like the fields of Ypres or something. It seemed a bit OTT as it turned out that an estate agents’ board was across the pipe entrance and just removing that might have been enough, but we figured it was in a good cause and would grow back.

Well it did grow back, and last month I took these photos there:

Not exactly a beauty spot, but not too bad. According to an authoritative source (ie my sister) those are increasingly rare native bluebells which were growing on the banks of the stream.

And now jump forward to last week and just when the scars in the land were healing over nicely, the diggers arrived again. Here are some photos taken of the same place last week:

Obviously the area around the sluice has been cleared again, and some access steps have been added. More worrying is the proper hard-surface path leading from the pavement and the newly levelled track leading into the woods. Those muddy slopes, by the way, are the exact location where I took the pictures of bluebells just a few weeks before.

I don’t mind having some work done to prevent flooding and make the area safe – it was dangerous before when the water must have been 4 or 5 metres deep in an area where all the local kids play – but I do have to wonder why everything could not have been done in one go. Surely it would have been cheaper.

The interesting thing is that there seems to be no requirement to warn nearby residents about this sort of work. If even a small unobtrusive shed was being built there we would have had letters from the planning department and a notice stuck up somewhere, but pure landscaping, even when it is quite extensive, doesn’t get notified at all.

As a result, we don’t know if the work is now finished or whether there is more to come. I am guessing there is more since the fences are still up. So we have no idea how far the path will continue: will it go all the way through to the open land at the top of Farnham Close? You can imagine how much we enjoy the prospect of mini-motos bombing up and down behind our houses.

If there is more work to be done I just hope it is going to be done now and not left a year until the grass and, hopefully, the bluebells grow back.