Last Weekends Pick - Kingston St Mary

I'm a bit behind with my admin and havent posted on here quite as quick as I should!

Last Sunday afternoon I managed to get out for another pick; for this pick we went up to Kingston st Mary I used to go up here every other weekend to Flying Start Riding Center but since they moved this is the first time I have been back. We walked 3.8km – parking in a layby a little way away from the village and walking up to and through the village to the pub before turning round.

We ended up getting 1.6kg of rubbish and 3.9kg of recycling.

Most of this rubbish was along the sides of roads, probably where people have thrown it out of car windows whilst driving. A lot of what we found was alcohol cans – Carling and Whisky and Coke cans were the most frequent finds. There were many scattered around the bottom of hedges, and on the grass by the side of the road, some were hidden under vegetation suggesting they had been there a while.

It felt quite a dangerous place to pick as the roads we were going along were quite busy, and there weren’t many places to stand to the side either! We may need to get some hi-vis if we do something similar again.

It was a flat easy walk though and not too long

Before our walk we went to pick up some signs we had left out. 1 had been town down and thrown away but 1 was still in place. We decided to try a new way of sticking out signs up this week - as it seems more secure and doesn't involve making any holes in the laminated paper, we tied tape around the top and bottom to keep it up instead and selected thick lampposts or poles to attach them to.

When we were driving to our pick we noticed that a layby on the way was particularly litter strewn so on the way back, we stopped to clean up this layby.

Whilst we were out we were talking about how quickly the year had gone and how much we were looking forward to Christmas – somehow this led to a Spotify Christmas playlist being played as we picked and as we drove home. HoHoHo!

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