V Festival's blot on the landscape revealed
It looks like a dried-up lake in the middle of the rolling green countryside.
Small islands of trees stand out from the muddy brown landscape – hundreds of acres in size.
But this is no snapshot of the effect of climate change – but the aftermath of one of Britain's largest music festivals. The aerial shot taken above Weston Park shows the huge effect of V Festival and how tens of thousands of people – and a couple of storms – can devastate beautiful country parkland and cause a great scar on the landscape.
The rock stars and revellers have long gone and their abandoned tents, camping chairs and other debris has been cleared up by Rotary volunteers. But left behind is the muddy brown earth, devoid of grass and still bearing the tracks of the man-made footpaths that wound through the festival site.
However, as gardeners will tell you, the green shoots of recovery will soon be showing through the bare earth. Percy Thrower once described grass as a "most resilient plant".
