The Hospital Map

In the course of a bit of garage clearance yesterday came across this splendid map of most of the Epsom hospital cluster prepared by the developers. More than three feet square and a tribute to the amount of money to be made out of such developments. Couldn't bring myself to throw it away so it now has shelf space in the study.

For once, a pity I did not have a proper camera which could have produced a decent image, something one could really zoom into and inspect.

The rest of the papers, about half a barrow full, were buried in the informal compost heap behind the copper beech screen. This avoided both sorting out the stuff which ought to be shredded and overloading our domestic grade shredder.

Scraping the top layer off a patch of the heap revealed loose brown soil, plenty of humus with a scattering of lumps of bush and tree in the course of rotting down. Very dry and no worms, in fact no visible livestock at all, although I dare say a low power microscope would have revealed all kinds of monsters. Under that, a very clear transition to the clay underneath, very flat and very hard. I did not even try to dig down into that, contenting myself with dumping the paper on top of the clay and pulling the brown stuff back on top. At a guess the paper will be more or less rotted into the surrounding soil in about two years' time.