Walking The Dog

One big change I have noticed since returning to the area last year is the volume of traffic on many of our narrower country lanes. Back in the eighties when I was last living here and owned a dog it was quite possible to have a quiet walk around the New barn road, Babylon, Kenson hill circuit hardly seeing a car on most days, now on many occasions you have to get into the hedge to avoid frequent passing 4X4s and the like and I have now had to change the direction of one of my walks to avoid a milk tanker which uses the same route at about the same time . White van man is also someone to be avoided as they use the country back roads to keep to schedules.

Whilst it is undoubtedly the case that the growth in ownwership of 4x4s creates problems the use of GPS technology now means that people who would never have thought of using country back roads in the past now use them frequently and some of them seem to think that the use of satellite technology provides them with infallible routes and somehow protects them from having to run into inconvenient hazards like dog walkers. Some of them need reminding that some of the roads they are using were main roads when pack horses were the main form of transport and meeting an oncoming horse and cart would have created the sort of navigation problems they would only be able to have nightmares about.