Lurchers in the post-industrial landscape

[bunn]

Arsenic mining is forever... Hound atop arsenic spoilheap, still splendidly bald despite about a century of abandonment.  The heap, not the lurcher.  The lurcher is not particularly abandoned.


Poisonous spoilheaps are apparently a LOT of fun.

Comments

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Lurcher on top of the world! King lurcher!

[puddleshark.livejournal.com]

Lovely loony lurcher pics!

But I'm seriously impressed by how nothing - nothing at all! - grows on arsenic spoil. Wow.

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

I looked at the toxicity of soils from there for my PhD! If you make a habit of taking the dogs there, I'd wash their feet when you get them home...

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Rather exhausted lurcher - getting to the top of the world on a warm day is hard work!

[bunn.livejournal.com]

There's some thin, sad grass, and the odd bit of moss or lichen - and I suppose sand is quite a difficult environment, even if only salted.

But it is odd. I mean, this is an environment so damp that lichen and moss grow on my car!

[bunn.livejournal.com]

We go there from time to time, but we don't usually spend much time on the sands, they are surrounded by thick woodland, and sometimes we go down afterwards for a paddle in the river.

The river supplies drinking water to Plymouth and gets all the run-off, so I can only assume that it's considered sufficiently diluted by the time it gets down there!

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

I don't think run-off is that huge a problem - soil is pretty good at locking these things up, it's great stuff like that :)

But yeah, if the doggies tend to lick their paws after walks, you probably don't want them eating the dust...

[bunn.livejournal.com]

There's a very frightening stream on the other side of the valley - well, two frightening streams. One of them has very VERY clean rocks at the bottom. Honestly it's like it's a stream of bleach. And the other one is bright scary orange. Neither of them have anything growing in them.

I don't let the dogs go near those, but they never have any poison sand on them by the time we get home (about a mile away), I've tried wiping them over and nothing comes off. It's convenient having Teflon dogs.

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, soil isn't a miracle lock-up for everything...

Good, good :) (And I hope you didn't think I was implying you might be careless regarding this stuff because that wasn't my intention, it's just having worked in this area it's bit of a pet topic of mine - apparently one of the county councils down there somewhere used to use mining spoil to keep the weeds down in their car parks!)