Inside Croydon

On a clear day, you can see the pollution: the Sussex cattle at Roundshaw struggle on this week, four days after last Sunday’s snowfall. The Croydon skyline, from blue to dirty smoggy brown, visibly demonstrates the toxic air hanging over the town

NATURE NOTES: A year-long photo-diary of an area of exceptionally important wildlife habitat on our doorsteps is coming to a close, with nature so far resilient against the impact of the global climate crisis. But for how long? By STEVEN DOWNES

Back where we started: this single tree, close to the start of my walks, offers a constantly changing indicator of the seasons on the Downs

It was four days since the modest snowfall we’d had last Sunday, and the conditions underfoot at Roundshaw were, let’s say, crunchy. The first significant snowfall we’ve had hereabouts for a couple of years had stuck around, thanks to some below-zero temperatures during the daytime as well as at night.

The Sussex cattle, brought in each year to chomp down on the pasture in the paddocks to create the optimal environment for skylarks and small blue butterflies, were making the best of a bad job. With their brown, woolly coats, from a distance, if you screw up your eyes, you can half-imagine that they are American bison on the plains.

They’d been transferred into the second, smaller of the paddocks a week or so earlier. Not so much to offer them fresh grazing – the mild autumn had seen the grass growing well into November – but more to offer them the protection from the worst of the winter weather in the little spinney in the south-western corner, a natural corral that shields them from the wind as it blows in from over the Purley Way.

When I started this log of a year on Roundshaw Downs back in January, it had been as bleak as it gets. The spectrum of colours, from bright blue to smoggy brown, was a clear indicator then of the man-made, car-generated air pollution sitting over our town, slowly poisoning the lungs of its inhabitants. Continue reading →