The steel works of Port Talbot may have been taking the headines recently with the threat to employment and the prosperity of the local community, but other parts of Wales are facing their own challenges. The Heart of Wales (Calon Cymru) railway line runs through beautiful landscape, starting from Swansea and Llanelli, skirting the Brecon Beacons, and passing through Llandeilo, Llandovery, Builth Wells and Knighton, en route to Craven Arms in Shropshire. A great place to live, but with an uncertain future. Along with other rural areas in Wales the region has suffered from many years of depopulation and social and economic deprivation; all features of a challenging topography, poor transport links and remoteness from major centres of population. Read more...

Artists seem to have a profound effect on the public perception of woodlands.  When we think of British woodlands many people will think of paintings by John Constable or Joshua Reynolds.  But our view of woodlands is changing as new images are produced, whether in advertising or by contemporary artists.   A couple of years ago David Hockney experimented with a new technique, producing a series of pictures of woodlands in the Yorkshire Wolds using an iPad which were notable in several ways - they used vivid colour and bold, stylised lines to give one perspective on Yorkshire woodlands, but they were also taken from a particular perspective.  Hockney personally feels the cold and he isn't very agile now as he gets towards 80 (born 1937) so he did this series of paintings from his car and many of them feature the road itself and the verge.  Hockney was consciously or otherwise showing trees as they are seen by the majority of the British public in a car-dominated society. Read more...

Treasure! I clambered up from the woodland pit with a bottle that to me looked very old, beautiful and probably precious. I'd been curious about what was at the bottom of one of those steep-sided holes in the middle of a woodland. It turned out to be ancient rubbish from many decades ago and my bottle was part of that - no plastic in those days, just some glass bottles and rusty metal. I went back down and found an old enamelled vase with rust-made holes and I knew it would look much better after a spin in the dishwasher - if I could sneak it in without objections from the family! Read more...

Dr Dara Stanley of New Holloway, University of London has been looking at the effects of neonicotinoid pesticides on the ‘efficiency’ of bumblebee pollination of apples.  Several studies have already implicated these pesticides in the decline of foraging behaviour of bees / bumblebees.  As some 30% of agricultural crops depend on pollination by bees and  bumblebees, hover flies and other arthropods (with an estimated global value in excess of $350 billion / year) then the effects of these pesticides needs to be evaluated, so that informed debate on the banning or restriction  of their use can take place. Dr Stanley and associates exposed some bumblebees to ‘low’ levels of neonicotinoids (such as might be found in wild flowers), others were exposed to no pesticide.  Read more...