A COMMUNITY minded couple have come forward to clear up confusion over a pile of rubbish thought to have been dumped on a path in Annan last week.
The 13 sacks and some building debris were found in woodland near the dam with fly-tippers blamed for the haul.
However, it was actually the good work of an Annan couple who are on a mission to rid the local area of roadside rubbish and had collected and bagged it all up.
Trevor and Sylvia Muir, pictured right, who are both retired and live in Albert Place, spent several hours tackling the verges of the path, where a multitude of waste had been left over time by passers by.
Trevor, 72, said: “We see it all the time; Sylvia and I, we’re prolific walkers, especially up the river, and very often we’ll take a bag with us and pick up cans and whatever happens to be lying about.
“That particular lane is a wee favourite of ours and it just got increasingly worse with stuff and we said ‘are we going to do something about this or are we going to do something about it?’, so we decided to be proactive.”
He added they then got “stuck in” and carried out the clean-up across two days, and have since arranged for the council to collect the bin bags.
“It varied between stuff that people had obviously fly-tipped, like the body part of most of a car and a bit of another car,” Trevor said, “and then we found four tyres, nappies and various other things. But the disposable item of choice seems to be a half-drunk plastic bottle of Coca Cola – the amount of those that we lifted was unbelievable. It’s a beautiful lane, and it will be the same in two months – we’re not under any illusions, but it’s a pleasure to walk down it now.
“As you’re walking towards the path, if you look over the side of the road down that embankment, there’s bottles and pizza – people go and buy a pizza and eat it and instead of taking the box home and putting it in the bin they throw it down the side of the road.”
Reacting to items recently left by the road near Kirtlebridge, which were also mentioned in last week’s article, he said: “That takes a certain type of psyche, that. Not only to dump a fridge-freezer but leave all the food in it as well, a forensic psychologist could have a field day trying to make sense of that.”
Trevor added he and Sylvia intend to continue collecting rubbish locally and have already made plans to tackle a separate nearby flytipping hotspot.
