A day at Ormesby Hall. Georgian grandeur, 240 acres of parkland, the whole pastoral dream — except it sits cheek by jowl with Middlesbrough’s suburbs, and the public has made its feelings known.
We were there to pick litter.
The woodland strip along Ladgate Lane told the usual story. Packaging. Broken hardware. Poo bags. Sanitary products. Stray underpants — always the underpants. Then the bigger statements: a flat-screen television, a baby chair, not one but two Christmas trees, carpet offcuts, cushions. Someone had essentially redecorated and simply chosen the wrong skip.
Some of it had been there long enough to look almost geological. Almost. The trouble with laboratory-made materials is that nature has no answer to them. They do not break down. They fragment — endlessly, invisibly — into microplastics, spreading further the smaller they get. A fine tax on convenience, paid by everything else alive.
The dog poo bags deserve their own paragraph. There is always a cache of them, neatly knotted, tucked behind a tree like a gift for no one. A ritual. The dog owner bags the evidence and then abandons it with something approaching ceremony. The mind boggles and then stops, for its own protection.
What gave us real pause were the nitrous oxide canisters. We collected perhaps two dozen of the large industrial variety. Nitrous oxide causes euphoria and hallucinations — the British upper classes discovered this at the turn of the 19th century and threw “laughing gas parties” about it, which is exactly the sort of thing they would do.
The woodland version is less charming. Industrial canisters carry impurities. Even food-grade nitrous oxide is contaminated with manufacturing lubricants and was never intended for human lungs. The Georgians had crystal glassware and medical supervision. Ladgate Lane has wet leaves and no one coming.
Ormesby Hall is a beautiful place. It deserves better neighbours. So does everything else out there.
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