Part of the answer is that I am put off the Common by the depredations and other antics of the Chain Saw Volunteers, forever chopping things down in the interests of some eco-fad or other. The latest being a drive to eradicate something called the Turkey Oak, a species of oak which has popped up all over the place, displacing our native oak, without living long enough to produce the large handsome trees we know and love. A drive I am rather ambivalent about, as I am about other drives to eradicate invasive but successful plant species. For some sufficient but probably not very good reason, much keener on getting rid of invasive, large animal species like grey squirrels, foxes and badgers. Maybe mink and coypu too, although one does not hear as much about them these days as one used to.
The Volunteers popped up in the free press the other day as the shipping container they use as a shed to keep their gear in, hidden away somewhere on the Common, was burgled and the burglars made off with, amongst other things, the small all-terrain pickup used to move their chain saws from one action to the next. And while I do not approve of burglary, my disapproval of burglary will not carry me so far as to contribute to the costs of the replacement. Perhaps they will be covered by some borough insurance or other.
Another part of the answer is that both Horton Lane and Longmead Road make pleasant walking with plenty of trees & hedges and wide verges. Horton Lane, for example, can look great in the spring when the hawthorn is out. And even in the soft, damp mornings we had earlier this week.
Another part is that I am clearly a creature of habit.
And then, half way around this Clockwise, I came across a brown slug, between two and three inches long, which moved me to think that the light rain earlier in the morning had brought them all out. But then, I did not pass another on the whole walk, only getting as far as one of those small snails with the black and white striped shell. Cernuella virgata? On return, I checked in the compost bin, where there are often lots of slugs to be found, to find none there either. Perhaps it is getting late in the season for them to be out and about? Perhaps I was late and the crows had taken more or less all those caught by the sunrise out in the open?
Impressed by the wealth of material on the web about snails, I associate to our ignorance about some related mollusca called solenogastres, worm shaped marine animals, bottom feeders on other, smaller and sessile, metazoans. Some of them grow to as much as 15cm long and coming across them by chance the other day in Lecointre & Le Guyader, I found it odd that there were these common, quite large animals knocking about the world, of which I had never heard and of which not all that much was known at all, with the last proper investigation of development having taken place back in the nineteenth century, a time when everyone and his dog, including here George Eliot's partner George Lewes, did natural history. I suppose we all do the internet now.
Reference 1: see http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/round-and-about-in-epsom-2.html for the death of a Horton Lane turkey oak.
Reference 2: Lecointre & Le Guyader can be found in their original French at http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/
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