Fuming

We don't take holidays as such, basically living here at our home 365 days of the year. why go elsewhere when you love a place so much. But when the family come to visit, we take days off to go out to places in the locality.

One of the days we were missing for the day and when we found the damage done to the woodland, you would think a teenager was put in charge of the chainsaw.

But no, it was a contractor working for the Pembrokeshire County Council. Their remit was to make sure the footpath was kept open. Now we have 159 yards (145 metres) of footpath running through the bottom of our land, and we make sure that the footpath is always passable, nothing intrudes into the footpath space.

So when you find trees hacked back and chopped for no reason you want answers.

  This laurel was slashed for no reason, the branch grew away from the footpath.

This hazel was cut down yet grew 4 feet from the path and the branch did not grow toward the footpath.

Trees 10 feet (3.4 metres) away from the path were cut back, yet others only 2 feet (60 cm) away were left. The mature Beech was even cut. A branch 9feet (2.74 metres) above the path and the end of the branch the same distance away was cut off. Nothing made sense.

The contractor was caught the next day and gave a feeble sorry.

Asking a response from the Council is like holding onto a wet eel. Wriggling and squirming with an answer, but they will not just admit a mistake, hold their hands up and say sorry. They are still trying to cover their backs. The latest is that trees fallen across the path had to be cleared away. That's true, but not on our section.

Any trees that fall over our section of the footpath are cleared away in just a few days. The other areas owned by other people, the trees have been laid over the path for 2 years and more. But that is nothing to do with us.

Well anyhow we have the local paper onto it.  The reporter came to us and took a look and agreed with us. So the story could be in our local very soon.

To some it may seem nothing, but to us it's adding insult to injury. We have looked after and maintained this footpath since it was reopened 17 years ago trying to make it a natural walk of dappled sunlight and varied leaf patterns with contrasting viewpoints.

What we don't need is some idiot who has watched Texas Chainsaw Massacre reliving his pathetic fantasy in the countryside.

A peaceful sunlit woodland (before the contractors hit it)

The irony of it was we was visiting the Botanic Gardens of Wales at the time.

Free resources

Trying to keep my computing as green as I can, I am always looking for ways to improve its use. Here are a couple of utilities that I would like to share with anyone interested. Both are free to use and will cut down on waste.

The first is an ink saver called Preton Saver Home. When you click the final print button, Preton pops up where you adjust the amount of ink used for the print job. It ranges from high quality print to draught print, with in between's so you can adjust to your own liking. It even tells you how much  money you have saved in ink for each job. A great way to cut down on ink wastage.

The next helps save on paper and frustration. How many times have you wanted to print out information from the web and ended up with all the bits on the web page you don't, want printed out?

Copy and pasting into Word or Open Office from the web page is laborious, and the formatting of the page is always to cock. Get Print What You Like. It sits on the toolbar in the browser ready to click when you want to print out information from the web page. You then cut out anything you don't want until you get to the bare bones of the information you want printed. Click print and you have a good clean copy. No more coloured ads, web buttons or pictures that have no relevance to the information. A great ink saver along with Preton.

Another handy thing with Print What You Like, the information can be saved as a PDF file and not printed at all, 0% ink used!

Nothing to do with what I have written above, just thought you might like to see this lovely Rambler of ours, Leo's Eye.