Slopes of Greenwall

Image: © Ian Dodds Taken: 11 Jul 2022

I often ponder silly things. Such as what is the biggest area of land in the UK bounded by through roads - ie unless you were heading down a dead-end to specifically get to a location, you would never see a lot of the grid-squares, and probably then even not many of them. (In the unlikely event that somebody takes this idea seriously in the future I would specify a through road as being one on which you can drive in either direction and eventually get to any other destination in Britain or Ireland.) Undoubtedly the top ten would be in the Scottish Highlands, the land of the 100 mile detour. This is just a tiny specimen of the group, and would probably not even make the top 250. However, at a conservative estimate I reckon there are at least 15 square kilometres of land in the triangle bounded by the A71 (Edinburgh - Kilmarnock), the A706 (Linlithgow to Lanark) and the B715 (Forth to Headless Cross via Climpy), and the land in between is unsurprisingly rarely geographed. I myself arrived in this square by mistake; the blame lies equally between me and the map in my opinion! The ground near the forest is slow-going, as indicated by the tall grass, but not particularly boggy (in a dry spell at least). It is Forestry Commission - or at least it used to be. Scotland got round to devolving its forests in 2018 (though very few signs have been updated), but former Forestry Commission land now operates under the name 'Scottish Forestry'. If they had just gone with 'Scottish Forestry Commission' would it not save on OS ink?! I forget the actual wordings, but both the new Scottish and rump English/Welsh Forestry Commission have now split in half to confuse things further - one half for the admin/strategy, and one half for the day-to-day planting and felling operations. In Northern Ireland it is the Forestry Service, so as far as I'm concerned they can do what they like (good powerful name!) Sheep are kept down below and cattle above as usual. Whilst the plantation is all conifer it was interesting to see that the recent replanting was all broadleafed.

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